WikiBuddy

About:

The goal of this Ruby script (main.rb) is to go through your wiki pages and show what pages link to each page. Also, it automatically creates a tree of your pages for your _Sidebar. The relationships in the tree are based on all the internal links of your pages. The tree roots itself at your Home.rb page.

WikiBuddy was designed to work with the Wiki on GitHub. So far it only supports markdown pages.

Example:

My Reference Wiki uses WikiBuddy.

Installing:

Basically, clone your wiki, clone this, and point this to your wiki.

• Clone your GitHub Wiki repository onto the disk that will house WikiBuddy.
• Clone this repository and modify Constants.rb, so that the WIKI_DIR constant points to your GitHub Wiki Git repository.

Usage

Basically, pull from your wiki, run main.rb, and push the changes back to your wiki.

• git pull from your Wiki to make sure you are up to date.
• Add relationships to your "top level" pages in Home.md. This makes sure that the tree is rooted in the right spot.
• Run main.rb. This will modify some files by adding reciprocal "Related to" links, and it will overwrite _Sidebar.md with a page tree. If _Sidebar.md doesn't exist, it will be created.

./main.rb

• You should probably make sure you're okay with the changes in you GitHub Wiki repository. For example

# see what files were changed
git status
# see what the changes were
git diff
# if you don't like the changes for a file / files, revert them
git checkout filename.md

• Update your GitHub Wiki

# if _Sidebar.md (or any other file) was created, add it in to Git
# -A will add all files not yet added or ignored, you can replace -A with the file name
git add -A
# following two lines are what you will usually do to update your GitHub wiki
git commit -a -m "your wiki update message here"
git push

• Go look at the changes on GitHub.

If you have a link to page B from page A, then Wiki Buddy will automatically create a link back to page A from page B. It will put the created link in a "Related To" section. As you create your pages, you do not have to make your own "Related To" sections, since WikiBuddy will scan the entire page for internal links.

Options

• You can change these settings in Constants.rb:
  • The root file ROOT
  • The short sidebar page (orphaned pages not shown): SIDEBAR
    • Maximum depth to show sidebar: MAX_SHOW_DEPTH
    • Maximum parse depth: MAX_PARSE_DEPTH
    • Maximum number of nodes to show: MAX_NODES
  • The full sidebar - with orphan pages: FULL_TREE
• You can change these setting in main.rb;
  • Bullet symbol: TreeMaker.setBullet()
  • Indentation symbol: TreeMaker.setFiller()

FAQ

• I get a permission denied error when I try to run ./main.rb
  • Change the file permissions for main.rb to executable for you, something like:

chmod 764 main.rb