TWiki on FreeBSD

TWiki is present in the FreeBSD ports collection as www/twiki. The port was created by Main.JustinHawkins in March 2003. In April 2008 it was refactored into modular design. As of now, www/twiki is just the core engine, while all the extensions, default and otherwise, come as separate ports - www/twiki-*.

Ease of deployment

Ports are a great feature of FreeBSD. In case of TWiki, you'll never have to mind dependencies, neither internal (where one extensions depends on another), nor external (on CPAN modules and third-party tools). Clean modular design allows for no-frills installations. For example, if you don't need the new TinyMCE, just don't install the twiki-TinyMCEPlugin port, or if you already have it installed, just remove it with pkg_delete -x twiki-TinyMCEPlugin.

If you want to install a new plugin, just cd into /usr/ports/www/twiki-WhateverPlugin and run make install. You'll only need to enable it in LocalSite.cfg or via bin/configure. Of course, you could use configure to install and manage extensions without ports, but having them as system packages slipstreams your work on maintaining your system and applications into one uniform task.

At the moment, only a fraction of all TWiki extensions is present in ports. If you you more, send a request to ports@FreeBSD.org, the current TWiki maintainer (infofarmer@FreeBSD.org as of this writing), or read http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/TWiki and make your own port - the process is mostly automated and only takes a minute when you get the hold of it.

Initial deployment

Getting core TWiki up and running should be as simple as cd /usr/ports/www/twiki; make install. Modern installations will also need www/twiki-TWikiUserMappingContrib.

Further development

Work is under way to facilitate and automate administration of TWiki on FreeBSD, including easier updates. More info here: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/TWiki

Comments

While installing twiki on FreeBSD I noticed that there is a new Makefile (updated 20070119) and that there are new maintainers at FreeBSD.org. Many thanks to JustinHawkins for porting this great product to FreeBSD and thanks to the FreeBSD staff for maintaining this port!

-- KeithEngell - 20 Jan 2007

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See also TWikiOnUnix.