For the Documentation Specialists

Jason Hille

• 2 min read
For the Documentation Specialists
The Wiki for the Free, Open-Source generation

I have a home lab. For those of you that need a bit more of an explaination, I am a huge nerd that has my own network and servers that I host and use for various things ... mostly learning, but all of it for fun. Having a home lab paves the way for people who work in my industry to learn what products are out there, how the products work, and if those products can serve as viable solutions in mainstream business operations. Home labs can scale quickly and sometimes you might lose track of past projects, current projects, or ideas for new projects. So, how can we document all that we work on ... why, use a Wiki.

"What is BookStack?" you might ask. It's a good question, honestly. The name is rather ambiguous and not all that relatable to what we think of as a wiki. BookStack is a free, open-source, and self-hosted wiki/documentation platform. It's designed with simplicity in mind, presenting information through an intuitive hierarchy of Shelves → Books → Chapters → Pages, which mirrors real-world organization in a way that’s easy to understand and navigate.

Let's break that down a little. Let's say your home lab has a virtual machine host; a server that has virtual servers deployed. You Shelf would be Home Lab; the Book would be Virtual Machine Host; the Chapter would be Virtual Machines; and the Page(s) would contain detailed information about those virtual machines; type, purpose, operating system, etc. You can arrange just about any way you want, but  you get the idea.

Key Features:

  1. Offers both a WYSIWYG editor as well as an optional Markdown editor with live preview.
  2. Organizational Structure: Supports flexible navigation and content hierarchy. You can move, reorder, and categorize items across shelves, books, chapters, and pages.
  3. Search & Linking: Boasts a powerful search across all content and the ability to link directly to any specific paragraph.
  4. Access Control: Provides role-based permissions and authentication integration (e.g., email/password, OAuth, LDAP, SAML, etc.) for secure, adaptable access.
  5. Customization & Extensibility: Customize the platform via theming, injecting custom HTML/CSS/JS, using the built-in REST API, or implementing logical themes for deeper back-end tweaks.
  6. Multi-Language Support: Available in over 30 languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, and many more.
  7. Lightweight & Efficient: Runs smoothly on minimal hardware—even on a $5/month cloud server—with optional deployment via Docker, PHP, MySQL/MariaDB.
  8. It includes built-in integration with diagrams.net (open-source fork of Draw.IO), letting you create and embed diagrams right within your documentation via both the WYSIWYG and Markdown editors. Diagrams are stored as PNG images (with the original drawing data embedded for future editing).

BookStack is amazing because it takes something as potentially dry and complex as documentation and makes it simple, elegant, and even enjoyable to use — whether you're a sysadmin documenting your infrastructure, a developer organizing API notes, or just keeping track of your homelab setup.