Selfhosting a Household Wiki

I've always felt that the way we kept track of things around the house could be improved.

Very often I found myself searching and scrolling through the family chat history to find back things like recipes and contacts.

It was just a cluttered mess. Some important data resides on a chat, some was kept in Google Keep and others were just written on a piece of paper that you never seem to find when you actually need it.

So we decided to go for a more structured approach and set up a Wiki.

Since I already have a trusty old Pine64 SBC running in the basement, it was an easy choice to assign it the task of hosting the Wiki.

After testing out a couple of open source Wiki solutions, I finally decided on BookStack.

Installation through Docker was straightforward and the wiki was up and running in a few minutes.

It's not directly exposed to the internet, in the rare case that we need to access it from outside the local network, we can just dial in to the VPN first and then access it as if it were a local resource.

Here is some of the data that we now have centralized:

Contacts

- Emergency contacts (Doctors, Hospital, etc.)

- Christmas/New Year mailing list

Cycling

- Bike trip checklist

- Parts (Tire sizes)

House

- Lighting (Which type of lights are used in which spot around the house)

Recipes

- All the recipes that we regularly revisit stored in one place

Garden

- Vegetable garden planning (what to sow, when it was sown, etc.)

You can get in touch through Mastodon:

Selfhosting a Household Wiki was published on 2024-06-27