A beer, a Go binary, and a wiki · LeafWiki<br>Blog ·<br>16 June 2026<br>A beer, a Go binary, and a wiki

About a year ago I was having a beer with a friend who runs engineering at a startup. I was complaining about Wiki.js.<br>Nothing dramatic. Just the small things that had been adding up.<br>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.<br>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&rsquo;t signed up for that. The team had around 700 pages. Not a large knowledge base by any measure. But the stack didn&rsquo;t care — it needed the same amount of operating regardless. I wrote about that separately if you want the longer version.<br>My friend said: wouldn&rsquo;t it be nice if it was just a Go binary? You start it, the wiki is there.<br>That was the whole conversation. We finished our beers and went home.<br>A few weeks later I started building.<br>What I actually wanted<br>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. The editor should get out of the way — Markdown on the left, preview on the right, done.<br>I wanted the data to be mine in a real sense. Plain Markdown on disk — not locked in a database I can&rsquo;t read without the application. I can zip it up, put it in Git, or move it anywhere. The interface should not own the knowledge.<br>I wanted something fast. Ctrl+P to find a page by title. Ctrl+V to paste an image. Creating a new page should take seconds.<br>I didn&rsquo;t need real-time collaboration. I didn&rsquo;t need a kanban board. I didn&rsquo;t need per-user pricing that charged me for everyone who reads the docs.<br>What I built<br>LeafWiki is a single Go binary. You start it, point it at a data directory, and the wiki is there. You write through the UI — but the content lives as plain Markdown files on disk, not in a database. No proprietary format, no export step. Tree navigation, full-text search, a simple editor. Image paste works with Ctrl+V.<br>No Postgres. No Node.js. No update that requires migrating a database schema. It runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and Raspberry Pi — whatever you have sitting around.<br>I didn&rsquo;t make a big deal of it for almost a year. I used it myself, fixed things that annoyed me, and wrote a few posts on dev.to. Picked up a handful of users. Kept building. Then I posted on r/selfhosted — and the response was bigger than I expected.<br>Then something unexpected happened<br>A few weeks after the selfhosted post I found out someone in Turkey had built a documentation site for an education technology project on it — guides and support docs for teachers.<br>They never reached out. I stumbled across it while searching for LeafWiki mentions online.<br>That felt like the right kind of validation.<br>Then I heard from Sergio<br>Sergio had been running Wiki.js. Not complaining. Just using it. Until the small things added up — managing assets, sidebar trees, links. All the overhead that came with the tool itself.<br>He switched to LeafWiki. He&rsquo;s building a documentation wiki for hardware parts. His description of the difference:<br>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been using Wiki.js up until some months ago but it was too much effort to manage assets, sidebar tree, links&mldr; here it&rsquo;s just &lsquo;create page in sidebar → upload assets per page → done&rsquo;&rdquo;

He started sponsoring the project. Not because I asked. Not because of a pricing page. Because the tool stopped being in the way.<br>That&rsquo;s exactly what I was trying to build.<br>Is it for you?<br>It&rsquo;s pre-1.0 and still in active development. Some rough edges remain.<br>Probably not if you need real-time collaboration or a large team with complex permissions.<br>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&rsquo;t need its own maintenance schedule.<br>Free and open source: github.com/perber/leafwiki<br>If you find it useful, consider sponsoring the project — it helps keep development going.<br>If self-hosting isn&rsquo;t your thing, there&rsquo;s a hosted version coming — join the waitlist.

Tags<br>story<br>open-source<br>self-hosting<br>founder<br>wiki<br>← All posts