TWiki for Personal use

TWikiPersonal is an all-in-one program running TWiki, intended to be used by one person on one computer. Unfortunately the program can not be made available for download because its components have incompatible licenses.

Features

The idea is to package TWiki with a Perl executable, a webserver written in Perl and all required libraries into a single executable using CPAN:PAR::Packer. This way, TWiki finds its libraries and the web server finds TWiki and the data directories without any configuration.

Installation and Use

TWiki Personal for Windows

Installation:

• Unfortunately there is no easy way to install the personal edition. The idea to bundle it all together comes with challenges regarding the individual library licenses which have not yet been solved.
• Everyone can build the personal edition in the same way I'm doing it. TWikiPersonalDev shows how it is done from a SVN checkout. On the other hand, this means installing all the individual components and then running the build procedure, which brings more complexity than just installing TWiki in the traditional way.

Initial use:

1. Start twiki.exe (or the shortcut)
2. Point your browser to http://localhost:5000/
   • On first execution, you'll be asked to enter your configuration password. Even for a personal installation, it is a good idea to have some protection for critical actions. TWiki then guesses some configuration parameters, which you can just accept, or change right now or later. Just save the configuration, even if you didn't change anything.

Regular use:

• Your usual entry point is http://localhost:5000/bin/view/.
• For editing, either register a user or use the login admin and the password you provided during initial use.
  • Advanced configuration: If you don't want to register, yet want your name to appear in page signatures, change the values for AdminUserLogin (default: admin) and AdminUserWikiName (default: TWikiAdminUser) with http://localhost:5000/bin/configure. You need to check the "yes, I've read the documentation" disclaimer to see this option.
• If you create a shortcut for twiki.exe, you can also provide parameters:
  • --access-log=some/location - Send the access log to a file, otherwise it is sent to the console
  • --port=1234 - If you want to use a port different from the default (5000)
  • ...and a lot more. See CPAN:plackup for a full description.

Known limitations and bugs

• After installing an extension with configure, the pattern skin layout is crippled. Remedy: Restart the server. configure wasn't meant to be run in a persistent Perl environment. This should be fixed, but is not on top of my priority list.
• Only a few extensions and not all features have been tested. There is a chance that any extension or feature needs a Perl module not included in Personal TWiki, or an external tool. Please report your observations in the Support web.
• It is not (yet) possible to add extensions that bring their own bin or tools scripts.
• Sending Mail is not enabled.
• Only TemplateLogin is available as login mechanism.
• The only way to stop TWiki Personal is to kill the console window, which leaves a nasty error dialog on Windows. There are no other bad effects.
• Statistics doesn't work. In the default settings, TWiki doesn't log anything, so there's nothing to count.

Questions and Answers

How does it work without a web server, and even without Perl?

On Windows, the Perl interpreter is contained in the executable, as well as all Perl modules of Personal TWiki. These modules consist of TWiki itself, and of a web server written in Perl. A new TWiki engine based on PSGI instead of CGI acts as a glue between TWiki and the web server.

Where are the TWiki modules?

They are contained in the package. On startup, they are expanded to a temporary directory.

How are extensions added to Personal TWiki?

From the user's point of view, as in other TWiki installations. From a technical point of view, they are going into the lib directory of the distribution.

I have made a change in bin/view, and it doesn't take effect. Why?

The files in bin are not used by Personal TWiki.

Status

The goal of the project, getting a TWiki up and running as easy as unpacking a zip file, can not be achieved in an easy way. I am not happy about it, but the project has come to an end.

-- Contributors: Harald Jörg - 2015-06-06 - 2018-09-04

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