I spent entirely too many hours this weekend installing and writing up installation notes for setting up a MoinMoin wiki on a DreamHost-hosted website. But, as in all these exercises (Movable Type, Gallery), I learned a lot. I still have a couple tweaks I would like to make to my install, but at least everything seems to basically work.
MoinMoin Wiki is a Python-based implementation of Ward Cunningham’s original Wiki concept. For me, a Wiki is a great tool for managing unstructured knowledge over the web. Since Wikis are designed to allow anyone to easily edit the content, they are fantastic for collaboration.
What they aren’t so good for is highly structured, hierarchical data. They also don’t initially appeal control freaks, although the level of versioning control that the better Wiki tools offer really should appeal to them.
Ward’s Wiki Design Principles capture the overall ideas quite well.
My site is hosted by Dreamhost, too. Your instructions (and the ones on the MoinMoin web site) did not work for me. I get an exception when trying to run moin.cgi from the command line. It says
“AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘strip'”
I suspect that this might be a Python version problem. Could you please tell me what version /usr/bin/python is on your machine? On mine (soda) it’s 2.1.3.
Thanks!
It’s version 2.1.3 on my machine (dali), too. I’ll email you with some more info, and add a new comment if I can figure it out.
I really appreciate your work in putting up these instructions. However, I think I’m also getting some errors from using the wrong Python version. I went into moin.cgi and changed all the references to “python” to “python2.2” as the DreamHost Knowledge Base article suggested — but I have a feeling that I need to do more/different. While installing, I got all the usual syntax errors and warnings you predicted, but everything looked fine otherwise. Nevertheless, I’m now getting a 404. I moved the moin.cgi file to be in the same directory as wiki/index.html, just in case that was the problem, but nothing has changed. Advice?
Hello Robert, I came across your tutorial when searching for moinmoin installation. It took me a while to get it working the way I wanted and just want to share something since you couldn’t get the cgi-bin stuff to work. I put this in the .htaccess,
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/?(.*)$ ../cgi-bin/moin.cgi/$1 [type=application/x-httpd-cgi]
Then in cgi-bin/moin.cgi, I add this
request = properties = {‘script_name’:’/moin’}
Other tutorials say to use properties = RequestCGI, but I guess that’s for old version. I’m using 1.6.3.
Also I didn’t have to change the cook_path as other tutorials mentioned, saving preferences work. I guess that’s why it was not working for you when saving preferences.
Hello Robert, I came across your tutorial when searching for moinmoin installation. It took me a while to get it working the way I wanted and just want to share something since you couldn’t get the cgi-bin stuff to work. I put this in the .htaccess,
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/?(.*)$ ../cgi-bin/moin.cgi/$1 [type=application/x-httpd-cgi]
Then in cgi-bin/moin.cgi, I add this
request = properties = {‘script_name’:’/moin’}
Other tutorials say to use properties = RequestCGI, but I guess that’s for old version. I’m using 1.6.3.
sorry for spamming but looks like last comment didn’t go through.