I am investigating how to easily setup a local work copy of a Branchable site, in the spirit of Ikiwiki's laptop wiki with git page. I would be very interested in reading some feedback!

• First, let's export the name of the site, and the local parameters.

export NAME=the-name-of-the-site-to-copy
export LOCALPATH=/path/for/local/copy
export LOCALDOMAIN=localdomain.example.com

• Second, let's clone its configuration and make a local branch. Later, configuration changes made on Branchable can be merged in that branch.

mkdir -p $NAME/setup
cd $NAME/setup

git init
git remote add origin -t setup ssh://b-$NAME@$NAME.branchable.com/
git fetch origin
git checkout -b setup origin/setup
git checkout -b local-setup

• The setup file needs to be adapted to local paths, and the branchable modules need to be disabled.

# Adapt to local paths and names.
sed -i "s|/home/b-|$LOCALPATH/|" ikiwiki.setup
sed -i "s|branchable.com|$LOCALDOMAIN|" ikiwiki.setup 

# Disable the branchable plugins
sed -i -e '/  - branchable/d' -e '/  - ikiwikihosting/d' ikiwiki.setup

# Do not push/pull as we are working in ‘laptop’ mode.
sed -i 's|source.git/hooks/post-update|source/.git/hooks/post-commit|' ikiwiki.setup 
sed -i 's|gitorigin_branch:.*|gitorigin_branch: ""|' ikiwiki.setup

• Now, let's clone the contents, and compile them locally:

cd ..
git clone ssh://b-$NAME@$NAME.branchable.com/ source
ikiwiki --setup setup/ikiwiki.setup

• The local HTML files can be served with Apache, with a configuration file similar to the one used in branchable:

curl 'http://source.ikiwiki-hosting.branchable.com/?p=source.git;a=blob_plain;f=templates/apache-site.tmpl;hb=HEAD' |
perl -MHTML::Template -e '
   $template = HTML::Template->new(filename => "/dev/stdin") ;
   $template->param(ADMINEMAIL => "admin\@example.com",
                    HOSTNAME => "somewhere.localdomain.example.com",
                    HOME => "/path/to/the/compiled/files");
   print $template->output' 

Charles, that's a great walkthrough. It probably deserves to be in tips.

Added, thanks for the encouragement ! --Charles

Of course, step zero is to install ikiwiki on your computer.

A future plan of mine is to add a two-level configuration to ikiwiki. That will let us leave the branchable-specific parts out of the main ikiwiki.setup file, and make this process slightly easier.

I don't know if using our apache-site.tmpl is worth the bother. The only significant apache setting is making ikiwiki the 404 handler. --Joey