About a year ago I was having a beer with a friend who runs engineering at a startup. I was complaining about Wiki.js.
Nothing dramatic. Just the small things that had been adding up.
Pasting an image into the editor opened a file picker — you had to choose a storage location before the image would appear. I wanted Ctrl+V and done. I wanted to write an incident report without thinking about where the screenshot lives.
And then there were the updates. Wiki.js runs on Node.js with a Postgres database. Every few months something needed updating. The wiki itself was fine, but keeping it running was its own small maintenance job. I hadn’t signed up for that. I wrote about that separately if you want the longer version.
My friend said: wouldn’t it be nice if it was just a Go binary? You start it, the wiki is there.
That was the whole conversation. We finished our beers and went home.
A few weeks later I started building.
What I actually wanted
I wanted to open a page and start typing. Not configure a storage backend, not run a migration, not remember which folder something was in.
I wanted the data to be mine in a real sense. Plain Markdown files I could open in any editor, put in Git, or just zip up and keep forever. Not locked in a database that requires a specific application to read.
I wanted something fast. Ctrl+P to find a page by title. Ctrl+V to paste an image. A few keystrokes to create a new page and start writing.
I didn’t need real-time collaboration. I didn’t need a kanban board. I didn’t need per-user pricing that charged me for everyone who reads the docs.
What I built
LeafWiki is a single Go binary. You start it, point it at a data directory, and the wiki is there. Content is stored as plain Markdown files on disk. Tree navigation, full-text search, a simple editor. Image paste works with Ctrl+V.
No Postgres. No Node.js. No update that requires migrating a database schema.
I didn’t tell anyone about it for almost a year. I used it myself, fixed things that annoyed me, and slowly it became something I actually wanted to use every day.
Then something unexpected happened
A few weeks ago I found out a Turkish school district was using it. They’d built their entire internal documentation site on it — FAQ pages, system guides, support docs for teachers.
I have no idea how they found the project. They never reached out. I stumbled across it while searching for LeafWiki mentions online.
I don’t know what to make of that except that someone found a tool that did exactly what they needed, installed it, and put it to work. No onboarding email from me. No demo call. Just a binary and a data directory.
That felt like the right kind of validation.
Is it for you?
Probably not if you need real-time collaboration or a large team with complex permissions.
Probably yes if you want to write runbooks and incident reports without fighting your tools, keep documentation in plain text you actually own, and run something that doesn’t need its own maintenance schedule.
Free and open source: github.com/perber/leafwiki
If you find it useful, consider sponsoring the project — it helps keep development going.