Building Tools with GitHub

Chapter 3. GitHub Wikis with Gollum

Wikis have revolutionized the way we create and digest information. It turns out that they are a great complement to technical projects (code repositories) because they allow nontechnical users to contribute in ways other than adding code. Gollum is an open source wiki created by GitHub. Just as Git has revolutionized collaborative editing of code, Gollum wikis layer the benefits of Git onto the widely used wiki publishing workflow. Gollum wikis are themselves repositories that generally annotate other typically code-centric repositories. GitHub makes it easy to associate a wiki with any repository.

In this chapter we’ll explore the basics of using Gollum, creating a wiki on GitHub and then learning how to edit it on GitHub and as a repository on our local machine. We will then create a Gollum wiki by hand from the command line, and show the bare minimum set of files to call something a Gollum repository. Finally, we will build a simple image organization tool that allows us to edit a Gollum wiki in an entirely different way, but still publishes information into GitHub as a regular Gollum wiki, exploring a little bit of the internals of Git along the way.

This chapter demonstrates code that modifies a Git repository programmatically. You will be able to follow along without possessing a deep understanding of the internals of Git. And, a good supplement to this chapter (and later chapters as well) is the Version Control with Git book from ...