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Outline: Self hostable, realtime, Markdown compatible knowledge base
- msk-lywenn 3y agoIt was a mess to set up the first time. It's getting better. With been using it for about a year and we're very happy with it.
- elmolino89 3y agoJust curious: any features (from your point of view obviously) making it a better choice compared to i.e free version of GitLab?
- msk-lywenn 3y agoI've never used gitlab so I can't say. We use gitea. I thought gitlab was some kind of github alternative, like gitea. It's a wiki too now?
- elmolino89 3y agoWell, both GitHub and the GitLab have wiki functionality. Not on par afaik with more familiar MediaWiki but nevertheless good enough for not just software project documentation. No experience with transforming these wikis into stand alone web sites with different styles etc.
- menotyou 3y ago[flagged]
- j45 3y agoAnything that is self hostable should have local login by email. Not having this means the login is not self hosted
- j45 3y agoI really would like to try this out locally. Then I realized it seems like it can’t without an internet connection.
- kallistisoft 3y agoOutline only uses SSO for authentication. The solution when self hosting is use a private keycloak server [1]. This allows you to do email based auth. [1] https://www.keycloak.org/ https://www.keycloak.org/
- msk-lywenn 3y agoYou can self host SSO. You maybe do already. Nextcloud, Gitea and Mattermost offer these services. We tried to use Mattermost but it didn't work. We went with Gitea. I only discovered later than Nextcloud also did.
- mxmilkiib 3y agoRelated issue re local auth https://github.com/outline/outline/issues/1881 https://github.com/outline/outline/issues/1881
- rudasn 3y agoNot the creator of this, but as an indie dev working on a sideproject that requires login, I also only expose third party auth as a means to avoid bots and malicious actors. I do have email authn enabled behind a flag though, and if anyone tells me that they want access without a social account I can share that special url with them. FWIW, I also avoid social logins, but I'm less vocal about it.
- msk-lywenn 3y agoYes, that's one of the big hurdles at install. We solved it by logging in from our Gitea instance.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Uninen 3y agoOur team quite recently switched from GitLab Wiki to (a self-hosted) Outline. The initial impressions were very good but after using it daily for a couple of months I really don't like the default theme(s) (dark nor bright) as the formatting options are very limited and the end result is less readable documents. You can probably tweak these things but we haven't gotten there yet. The search is great and you can set explicit "edit mode" in your profile settings so both reading and editong becomes clearer.
- bluish29 3y agoJust be careful that while it is self-hostable and the source is available, it is not open source [1,2]. If this is something important for your consideration before using it. [1] https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/main/LICENSE [2] https://fossa.com/blog/business-source-license-requirements-provisions-history/ https://fossa.com/blog/business-source-license-requirements-...
- webstrand 3y agoSo if I understand this correctly, I have _no_ license to use the software until late 2027? Including installation and contribution instructions in the README seems deceptive, since neither can be done legally.
- zaroth 3y agoI don’t think that’s right. You have no license to use it to host a commercial offering to third-parties, until the BSL rolls over to fully open source. But the license explicitly allows free self-hosting for your own company / employees.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- denysvitali 3y agoYou cannot use it in production. I'm actually curious how this license works for them. If they get a contribution without a CLA, then they themselves can hypothetically not use it in prod too? Edit: you can actually use it for your own, but you can't compete with their offering until the date mentioned in the license: > You may make use of the Licensed Work, provided that you may not use the Licensed Work for a Document Service. A “Document Service” is a commercial offering that allows third parties (other than your employees and contractors) to access the functionality of the Licensed Work by creating teams and documents controlled by such third parties.
- webstrand 3y ago
- CrypticShift 3y agoSo this is the new generation of Javascript self-hostable wikis inspired by Notion. I remember in the late 2000s, most were PHP-based, with Twiki being an exception: it was Perl-based and also had a powerful wiki/database combination [1]. But it was not intuitive to use. That's what Notion nailed a decade later. Now All the new (OSS ?) Notion clones like Outline are still deficient in that second database aspect. I hope we are eventually getting there. [1] https://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/StructuredWiki https://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/StructuredWiki
- ezst 3y agoGive Trilium a shot (as to why, I commented elsewhere in this thread in response to someone mentioning it), it's not super flashy at first sight, but in my experience, it gets the database aspect right.
- albybisy 3y agowhat are other good opensource alternatives?
- antiframe 3y agoYour question implies that Outline is opensource. It's not. I reread your question as "What are good opensource alternatives?" and it makes sense.
- deathanatos 3y agoMy org has used mdBook: https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/ https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/ (That link is itself a rendered mdBook, so that'll give you an idea of the feature set.) (While it's definitely a Rust "thing", if you just have a set of .md files, all you need is a "SUMMARY.md" (which contains the ToC) and a small config file; i.e., you don't have to have any Rust code to use it, and it works fine without. We document a large, mostly non-Rust codebase with it.)
- webwanderings 3y agoThis is pretty fast. Wow. Question for you. Does the search feature works out of the box, or does it need a plugin?
- deathanatos 3y agoIt works out of the box. It's pretty basic: mdBook just emits a JSON file containing the entire search index. The rendered book's JS then fetches that index, and uses it to implement the search client-side. (So that the whole book — search index included — can be served statically.) It usually finds what I'm looking for pretty easily, as long as I pick a good search term. It isn't the best search, though, and sometimes I'll just revert to `rg` in a CLI if it's in the way. The things I think people in our org didn't like: some people really really want a WYSIWYG editor, some people don't want to have to deal with making a commit to update docs¹, some people didn't like that the ToC enforced a hierarchy (and wanted a more Wiki style thing²). (¹I'm in the camp that docs should be reviewed through normal processes, though … I've seen a lot of instances otherwise of incorrect docs getting through, and/or just bad/nonsensical docs getting written. Our org's code review policy at the time most of the docs were written was "you should get a review, but a bot will auto-stamp it if you want to opt-out and then it's just on you", but nowadays we require review, but I don't feel like the reviews are rigorous.) (²to me a ToC is a wiki superset: if you want wiki behavior … just create a single level in the ToC, and all docs are at the same level. Alphabetize them if you don't want to think about the order. We call this section "Misc" in our ToC, but we do break some other parts out into more full-fledged sections. mdBook enforces that docs must appear in the ToC, which I think is a good thing for discoverability.)
- bityard 3y agoIt's nowhere near as featureful as Outline, but I wrote my own Markdown knowledge base thingy in Python. It is web-based and geared toward single-user (or _very_ small team use) but it's Apache licensed and has no commercial tie-ins. Super easy to deploy as long as you know how to layer some rudimentary authentication on top of it. https://github.com/cu/silicon https://github.com/cu/silicon
- infecto 3y agoWhen I was a younger developer I thought tooling solved all problems. As I grew more experience I slowly changed my mind that some problem spaces require not only tooling but process change. I am firmly in the camp that you don't need yet another documentation tool. The problem is a human/process one, documentation/knowledge bases need to be part of the process. As long as you can search it and its easy to update/create, I don't think the tool is solving much for you.
- Freak_NL 3y agoFriction frustrates processes though. If working with a tool is constant pain, then the process is going to suffer.
- infecto 3y agoTotally agree. Have definitely seen a bad tool used but largely the problem in my experience has been human.
- sdfghswe 3y ago> When I was a younger developer I thought tooling solved all problems. As I grew more experience I slowly changed my mind that some problem spaces require not only tooling but process change. Lets take it one step further. You start out thinking everything is tooling. As you grow more experienced you realize that everything is process. As you grow more experienced still, you realize that the world is really messy and rarely ever anything is everything.
- infecto 3y agoOf course the world is messy and there are many variables. I still sit in the camp that documentation is a human problem that requires both tooling and process. I wish Outline luck but on the documentation side, its largely a human/process one.
- flappyeagle 3y ago
- maklu 3y agoHave been using it for over 2 years now, for a team of nearly 80 people. Love it - both self-hosted and as a service. Very quick to respond to issues on github, and the tool keeps evolving.
- b2bsaas00 3y agoCould be used to host public pages for tutorials/guides for a SaaS?
- tommoor 3y agoYou can yes, in fact Outline's own documentation are hosted on Outline: https://docs.getoutline.com/s/guide https://docs.getoutline.com/s/guide
- o_____________o 3y agoWhat are the advantages over Obisidian? - Team oriented - Integrated with Slack - ?
- tommoor 3y agoI haven't really used Obsidian, but I'd imagine that the team aspect is the main advantage plus realtime collaborative editing as part of that. Outline is also used in a lot of orgs where the users are less technical, I'd imagine Obsidian could be quite intimidating in comparison.
- flappyeagle 3y agoWhat are the advantages of Figma over Illustrator? - Team oriented
- vunderba 3y agoThis is more of a self-hosted collaborative alternative to Notion than a personal note taking tool like Obsidian.
- joshfee 3y agoI just spun up a self hosted instance this past weekend, and while its fairly decent it doesn't seem to hit the mark compared to Notion (which I use at my day job). There's just a bit too much friction in creating pages (you need to click "publish" on every page you create), no /page command to quickly jump into a nested page, and. I'm more excited by Affine (https://affine.pro/ https://affine.pro/), though their self hosting support seems to be neglected, and it has the same "not actually open source" issue as Outline.
- msk-lywenn 3y agoVery interesting! I wonder how much friction there would be in migrating the data from outline to affine. Have you tried affine? If you did, how is the performance? Something I like a lot with outline is that it's super reactive and fast, even on low end servers or clients. Only the startup time is bad. What do they mean by "neglected self host"? Is it just because the docker packages are not up to date? Can't we just build and run what's on github?
- tommoor 3y agoImproving how drafts work is near the top of the roadmap, one of Outline's main value props is it's speed –so definitely want to reduce the friction here.
- tommoor 3y agoMaintainer here, happy to answer questions and glad to see it get some attention on HN :) Outline is a bootstrapped business. The software is used by thousands of teams, including government agencies, universities, and companies from startups to large corporates.
- kkfx 3y agoAfter years of a personal PIM (in org-mode and experiments with DokuWiki) I've concluded that to manage notes we do need some kind of structure, a free graph will became unmanageable after a certain quantity of notes. That structure is simply a chronology, since the flow of time is a thing common to pretty anything. My actual setup is: - daily notes, meaning when I want to write something I'll put in today note, no thinking about where to archive, under a common year root, with a monthly recap; - binders notes, who transclude or link single notes inside a daily one (headings in org-mode lingo) assembling and arranging them as I wish, under a "live archive" root; - not current anymore binders under a "dead archive" root. Such structure so far allow me to store and retrieve pretty anything and always find and consolidate things, something I can't do with ZK, LYT, PARA and other common techniques. That's to simply say a thing: we do not need the nth wiki style slick UI app but something that offer: - live rendering, like org-mode or even Zim, no separation between source form and rendered form, because that's makes easy write and edit things; - transclusion (TiddlyWiki, Dokuwiki+Include plugin (a bit limited), BookStack, org-transclude albeit a bit slow and limited) because to create our library of babel (cfr. Conrad Gessner ~1545 but also many others) we must been able to take atomic notes AND COMPOSE THEM in various ways; - attachment support (a decent one, org-attach it's ok, but only because it's bare simple so it's easy to hijack, Paperless it's damn slow but flexible enough and so on); - ability to INTEGRATE anything. In this regard ALL modern software can't win, simply because modern systems are designed for commercial reasons, not like classic ones where the OS was a single user-programmable application, and an application is just code added to the OS. The web try to recover DocUIs and composability but it's really limited. We can let's say link GMail threads in notes, but it's far from link a notmuch-accessed local mail linked in org-mode; - offering by default a chronology, even Zim offer that to a certain extent with the builtin calendar. Without the above just write some new and uncertain project fully knowing that migrating contents is far from being easy or granted and it's a very painful thing, is IMVHO a waste of time...