Replica is the code-name for the process used to publish ideas on operand.

To begin, ideas are added to a local copy of wiki.js. This is a fully modern wiki that runs easily in a container, in the cloud or on a local machine.

The wiki has a number of storage backends, including git. Many authors can log on to the wiki to edit and publish, and the wiki records all changes into a simple git codebase.

To harness the backups into a usable form, the container image for replica also includes a copy of gitea, a minimal code forge. Gitea helps replicate the pages among many users, so no one is locked into the wiki as an editor. Users can bring any chosen text editor, make changes fully offline, and push them back to the wiki through gitea.

Finally, Operand is able to read the pages in git, using the Elixir package source. The logic in this package has been pulled directly from the op codebase, the engine behind Operand since our beginning in 2024.

More Nuanced Procedures.

This is one in a sequence of experiments in wiki-js; in prior deployments some of the pages have been erased, or the backups failed, or the process was too cumbersome to spin up and access.

By deploying inside a single incus pod, the process is durable. By combining gitea, the backups are simple. From here on, even the loss of a pc should be a minor speed bump.

This page is going to be filled in, with proper zero-to-launch guidance. There are a number of manual phases to the launch, which I can accomplish in five minutes, and a number of them should be possible to automate.

Please reach me for a demo, if your organization is ready to upgrade your publishing process.