detailed look at wiki components

Several components collaborate to make this local wiki farm work. Here we consider the parts and their interaction with the whole.

Your web browser is an essential component. Most of your interaction with the local wiki farm will happen through your browser.

When your browser asks The Net where to find "localtest.me", it replies, "127.0.0.1" also known as "localhost" which is right where you are: on your own computer.

For our purposes, docker provides something like a simulation of a network within our laptop in which we run several services. The docker-compose.yml config file allows us to describe the network services succinctly, and the docker-compose command allow us to type simpler instructions at the command line when we wish to control or interact with the admin side of these services.

A reverse proxy server manages transport layer security (TLS) for our wiki. We use Caddy configured with self-signed certificates in large part because the configuration is remarkably easy. Including a reverse proxy also offers us a place to dispatch requests to adjacent services. For example, Caddy sends requests for the image-transporter to that service, and sends all other requests to our wiki farm.

The configuration for our container is maintained at Github: https://github.com/dobbs/proxy and published at Dockerhub: http://dockerhub.com/r/dobbs/proxy/

The heart of our service is a federated wiki server configured to act as a farm using the friends security plugin.

The configuration for our wiki container is also maintained at Github: https://github.com/dobbs/farm and published at Dockerhub: http://dockerhub.com/r/dobbs/farm/

You can read About Transport Plugin.

The configuration for our image transporter is also maintained at Github: https://github.com/dobbs/image-transporter and published at Dockerhub: http://dockerhub.com/r/dobbs/image-transporter