A wiki is a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly using a web browser. When you hear the word ‘wiki’, you most likely think immediately of Wikipedia, the most famous online encyclopedia. In fact, except Wikipedia and the server software behind, MediaWiki, you can find many other Wiki or Wiki software. In this article, we’ll introduce you the easiest way to create your own powerful Wiki on computer, setup a portable DokuWiki instance on Windows PC. Even beginners can install and configure their personal Wiki on local computers without any learning curve.
Why DokuWiki?
DokuWiki has many advantages compared to similar Wiki software.
- Easy to install and use
- Low system requirements
- Built-in Access Control Lists
- Large variety of extensions
- Over 50 languages supported
- Device independent
- Open Source
Wikis are quick to update and new pages are easily added. Designed for collaboration while maintaining a history of every change, DokuWiki could be used as
- Corporate Knowledge Base
- Private notebook
- Software manual
- Project workspace
- CMS – intranet
Download DokuWiki for Windows
Get it from its official website here https://download.dokuwiki.org/
The Candidate Release is recommended for most users. Make sure to select MicroApache (Windows). This component include a minimal webserver with PHP in your download so you don’t have to install third-party server tools like XAMPP, Wampserver. It helps you quickly run DokuWiki on your Windows PC or even an USB stick without extra installation. This is recommended for personal, single-user use only.
DokuWiki is available in a whole bunch of languages. You can save space by removing the language packs you won’t need.
Choose from some of the most popular plugins. We can skip this for now as we don’t need any to get started. We only need them to extend the functions of our Wiki site.
Click Download at the upper section or hit the Start download at the bottom to download the latest DokuWiki installer on to your PC.
The latest DokuWiki installer is merely 2.5MB without the web server software and additional plugins. With the MicroApache (Windows) included, the installer is only 8.8MB, still very small compared to MediaWiki which takes up to about 150MB for the latest version 1.34.1.
Unzip DokuWiki on Windows computer
DokuWiki package will be wrapped in tgz container. This is a very common UNIX archiving format similar to the popular ZIP format many Microsoft Windows user probably know. You will need an extraction tool to extract it on your Windows computer. You can choose 7-zip, PeaZip, IZArc, TUGZip, Simplyzip, WinZIP, WinRAR, WinACE or other similar tools. No need to install any of these tools if you already have one zip/unzip software installed on your PC.
Install & run the free Wiki on your Windows PC
DokuWiki provides us the easiest way to create our own powerful Wiki on local computer or network. Follow these steps to setup a portable DokuWiki instance in Windows.
Copy the extracted DokuWiki folder to a USB stick or your computer hard drive. Under the DokuWikiStick folder, you can find two subfolders and an executable file, dokuwiki, server and run.cmd.
Double click to run run.cmd file, the Windows command prompt opens. DokuWiki on a stick started, your web browser will now open http://localhost:8800. The DokuWiki Installer opens on your web browser.
The web installer will be English. You can however change it to your own language from the top right corner. Then fill in the required information. If you are the only one who will use this Wiki site on your computer, you can disable ACL. Click Save button at the bottom to finish the configuration. You can go to delete the install.php file in the dokuwiki folder. Then head to your Wiki site.
This is the welcome page of your Wiki site on local machine. Your wiki needs to have a start page. If the start page doesn’t exist, the Welcome page will be the home page.
Under the “Create your first pages“, there will be a link to the start page. Follow that link and create the first page of your Wiki site.
Stop DokuWiki site
In the Windows command prompt window where shows the status of your Wiki site, press any key to stop DokuWiki site and service.
