gone

Gone is a wiki engine written in Go. It's

• KISS,
• Convention over Configuration and
• designed with Developers and Admins in mind.

With Gone, you can

• display Markdown, HTML and Plaintext straight from the filesystem.
• edit just any file that's made of text.
• have all this without setup, no database needed, not even the tinyest configuration.

So go get it!

Installation

Assure that you have Go installed. Now, install the application via go get.

$ go get github.com/fxnn/gone

Binary releases will follow.

Usage

You can simply start Gone by calling its binary.

$ gone

The current working directory will now be served on port 8080.

• Display content. The file test.md in that working directory is now accessible as http://localhost:8080/test.md. It's a Markdown file, but Gone delivers a rendered webpage. Other files (text, HTML, PDF, ...) would simply be rendered as they are.
• Editing just anything that's made of text. In your browser, append ?edit in the address bar. Gone now sends you a text editor, allowing you to edit your file. Your file doesn't exist yet? Use ?create instead.
• Customize everything. Change how Gone looks. Call gone export-templates, and you will get the HTML, CSS and JavaScript behind Gone's frontend. Modify it as you like.

See gone -help for usage information and configuration options.

Access Control

NOTE, that these features only apply to UNIX based OSs. Especially the Windows implementation currently does not support most of the access control features.

Gone uses the file system's access control features. Of course, the Gone process can't read or write files it doesn't have a permission to. For example, if the Gone process is run by user joe, it won't be able to read a file only user ann has read permission for (as with rw-------).

Likewise, an anonymous user being not logged in can't read or write files through Gone, except those who have world permissions. For example, a file rw-rw-r-- might be read by an anonymous user, but he won't be able to change that file. Also, in a directory rwxrwxr-x, only a user being logged in may create new files.

Users can login by appending ?login to the URL. The login information is configured in a good old .htpasswd file, placed in the working directory of the Gone process. Authenticated users can read and write all files that are readable resp. writeable by the Gone process.

Note that there's a brute force blocker. After each failed login attempt, the login request will be answered with an increasing delay of up to 10 seconds. The request delay is imposed per user, per IP address and globally. The global delay, however, grows ten times slower than the other delays.

Security considerations

• Authentication information are submitted without encryption, so use SSL!
• Anyone may read and write files just by assigning world read/write permissions, so better chmod -R o-rw * if you want to keep your stuff secret!
• Gone uses the working directory for content delivery, so better use a start script which invokes cd!

Index documents, file names

Calling a directory, Gone will look for a file named index. Calling any file that does not exist (including index), Gone will try to look for files with a extension appended and use the first one in alphabetic order.

So, the file http://localhost:8080/test.md could also be referenced as http://localhost:8080/test, as long as no test file exists. In the same way, an index.md file can be used as index document and will fulfill the above requirements.

This mechanism is transparent to the user, no redirect will happen.

Links

When you create files with the extension url and put a URL inside it, Gone will serve it as a temporary 302 redirect.

Example:

$ echo "https://github.com" > github.url

A call to http://localhost:8080/github will get you redirected to GitHub now.

Templates

Gone uses some Go templates for its UI. The templates are shipped inside the executable, but you can use custom versions of them. For general information on Go HTML templates, see the html/template godoc.

With your web root as working directory, invoke gone export-templates. It creates a new folder .templates which will never be delivered via HTTP. You'll find all templates inside and can modify them. If you (re)start Gone now, it will use the templates from that directory.

Note, that you can also supply a custom template path. See gone -help for more information.

Future

Some day, Gone might be

• extensible. Plugin in version control, renderers, compilers or anything you like, cf. #29
• granting file access on a group level, using a htgroup file.
• searchable in full text.

Development

If you want to modify sources in this project, you might find the following information helpful.

Third party software

Please note that the project uses the vendoring tool https://github.com/kardianos/govendor. Also, we use the standard go vendor folder, which means that all external projects are vendored and to be found in the vendor folder. A list of projects and versions is managed under vendor/vendor.json. If you build with go-1.5, enable the GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT flag.

Gone imports code from following projects:

• abbot/go-http-auth for HTTP basic authentication
• fsnotify/fsnotify for watching files
• gorilla, a great web toolkit for Go, used for sessions and cookies
• russross/blackfriday, a well-made markdown processor for Go
• shurcooL/sanitized_anchor_name for making strings URL-compatible
• golang.org/x/crypto for session-related cryptography
• golang.org/x/net/context for request-scoped values
• fxnn/gopath for easy handling of filesystem paths

Also, the following commands are used to build gone:

• pierre/gotestcover to run tests with coverage analysis on multiple packages
• mjibson/esc for embedding files into the binary

Gone's frontend wouldn't be anything without

• ajaxorg/ace, a great in-browser editor

Architecture

               +------+
               | main |
               +------+
                |  | |
      +---------+  | +---------+
      v            v           v
  +-------+    +------+    +--------+
  | store |    | http |    | config |
  +-------+    +------+    +--------+
               /   |  \
     +--------+    |   +--------+
     v             v            v
+--------+    +--------+    +--------+
| viewer |    | editor |    | router |
+--------+    +--------+    +--------+

main just implements the startup logic and integrates all other top-level components. Depending on what config returns, a command is executed, which by default starts up the web server. From now on, we have to main parts.

On the one hand, there is the store that implements the whole storage. Currently, the only usable storage engine is the filesystem.

On the other hand, there is the http package that serves HTTP requests using different handlers. The router component directs each request to the matching handler. Handlers are implemented in the viewer and the editor package. While the editor serves the editing UI, the viewer is responsible for serving whatever file is requested.

Other noteable packages are as follows.

• The http/failer package delivers error pages for HTTP requests.
• The http/templates package caches and renders the templates used for HTML output.
• The resources package encapsulates access to static resources, which are bundled with each gone distribution.

See the Godoc for more information.

License (MIT)

Licensed under the MIT License, see LICENSE file for more information.