An entire wiki in a single file? A look at Feather Wiki

Imagine a wiki that is just a single HTML file. One that you can deploy anywhere: view locally, share in local network, put in any web server. No databases, no user management, no moving pieces that cause headaches.

Feather Wiki is a really cool project that I ran into a couple of weeks back. It’s a wiki project that fits the entire wiki, including all the content, in a single HTML file. You can upload it to a server (or use locally), make changes in browser and when you’re done with changes, you download a new version of itself with the changes and you can deploy that to update it.

Or like the project describes itself:

Feather Wiki is an HTML document containing a self-replicating JavaScript application for creating wiki-style websites whose content is also stored in the output.

You can edit the wiki in browser just like any other wiki but to permanently save the changes, you need to download a new copy of the entire wiki with new changes and upload that to your web server.

While this adds an extra step, I think the tradeoff is often a welcome one. To enable collaboration, you can have people submit pull requests to a git repository that gets deployed to a server.

I’m still experimenting with it myself and haven’t published any wikis built with it yet but I think it’s a wonderful choice for individuals or small communities that want an easy wiki solution.

Now available in Finnish!

Last weekend, I contributed to the project by providing Finnish translations. You can download the Finnish version from Downloads page. If any of the translations feels off or wrong, don’t hesitate to reach out or make a contribution directly to the project. Big thanks to existing translations of open source projects like WordPress that I was able to use for inspiration and checking if my translations made sense.