Bookstack

Bookstack is a self-hosted open source solution to create documentation.

As Devs, we do prefer the tool that we use to write this very documentation 😅. But it turns out that non technical profiles do not share our enthousiasm on writing markdown and deploying via github/docker compose 😋.

Bookstack thus comes handy as once deployed anybody (with the right authorization) can write and update content.

Setting up the bookstack stack

There is no sense in setting up locally Bookstack, we thus just present the production setup.

All relevant information can be found in the docker-compose.bookstack.yml file (here ).

You will need to create two folders in the folder containing docker-compose.bookstack.yml

• bookstack_app_data
• bookstack_storage_data

Warning

Be sure to give write access to the external world (chmod 755 presumably) for these folders. Otherwise you won't be able to upload documents. We lost some time on that 😅

you will need to create a .bookstack.env file and setting

• MYSQL_USER: username for the mySQL bookstack_db container
• MYSQL_PASSWORD: password associated to MYSQL_USER
• MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: password for the mySQL bookstack_db container
• MYSQL_DATABASE: the db name to which your bookstack container will connect to
• APP_URL: entry to the DNS address you created in order to reach the bookstack interface.
• DB_DATABASE: put the same value as in MYSQL_DATABASE
• DB_HOST: put here bookstack_db:3306
• DB_USERNAME: put the same value as in MYSQL_USER
• DB_PASSWORD: put the same value as in MYSQL_PASSWORD
• APP_KEY: As explained here
• bookstack_url: put the same value as in APP_URL

Warning

APP_KEY must be some random string with exactly 32 characters (we lost some time on that 😅).

To start the stack in production, you can make use of the Makefile provided in the repo (make help to list available commands). Launch

make bookstack-launch

pgAdmin will be accessible at bookstack_url. Please refer to the official documentation to create new users, contents...