TWiki On » TWiki on Raspberry Pi

Follow TWikiInstallationGuide carefully to install TWiki on RaspberryPi and most of the work is done.

Not all of the required CPAN libraries for TWiki are pre-installed with Raspbian, and you will have to follow HowToInstallCpanModules.

Several CPAN moduels where not possible to install with the cpan> install DateTime::TimeZone syntax from within the CPAN shell. For those I managed to install with apt-get.

-- Contributors: Erik Jagre - 2015-10-12

Discussion

Thank you Erik for contributing this doc!

Related document: Support.SID-01693

-- Peter Thoeny - 2015-10-12

I was lucky to get a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B for christmas. Of course, I accepted the challenge to get TWiki running on the device: I plan to replace/extend my own "personal information manager" to a "family information manager", running on the Raspberry. Due to its low power consumption, it can easily run 24 hours a day.

For sure, performance has improved since 2013 when Loic installed TWiki 5.1.4 (see Support.SID-01693) on previous Raspberry systems. I didn't want to bother with lighthttpd and fastCGI - so I gave the PSGI engine a try, which I'm familiar with due to my work for TWikiPersonal. TWikiasPSGIapplication gives a persistent interpreter (so no compilation overhead for every request), and also avoids the interprocess communication of fastCGI.

Maybe I get on the naughty list for next christmas: I admit that I ignored the installation guide. Instead, I adopted the build process I use for TWikiPersonal and voila - I got a TWiki executable for Raspberry.

Maybe a "Raspberry distribution" would be a useful contribution to sourceforge, so that non-Perl-users don't have to bother with missing CPAN modules? (Side note: I managed to install DateTime::TimeZone with CPAN without problems, so maybe Raspbian has improved recently). Or is it over-engineering, because Raspberry users are tech-savvy anyway?

-- Harald Jörg - 2015-12-30

Very cool, Harald!

Now we can brainstorm what can be done with TWiki on Raspberry Pi. GUI in conjunction with the IfThenActionPlugin to control IoT devices? Webcam front-end? What else?

-- Peter Thoeny - 2015-12-30

As a next step in improving my "home TWiki" on Raspberry I decided to abandon the single-threaded CPAN:plackup server which I had taken over from the windows personal distribution and to go for CPAN:Starman instead. Starman is a pre-forking, pure Perl web server which seems to be quite suitable for a Perl application like TWiki - again using TWiki's PSGI engine. I also switched to running TWiki as a service under systemd so that it starts automatically after a reboot, with just 11 lines of service configuration. I did not install any modules directly from CPAN, the Raspbian repositories have all packages I needed. The only thing that doesn't run out of the box is the configuration for sending mails - my SMTP provider requires authentication (which is a good thing).

-- Harald Jörg - 2017-09-05