Thibaut Barrère / LoGeek

h1. What is Pimki ?

I like Pimki because it's a lightweight wiki, easy to setup, and quite straightforward to use. I'm using it to mix technical and non-technical teams knowledge, operational procedures, write-ups, internal blogging. It works very well in my typical configuration (10 to 25 users on a daily basis).

I've been installing it a couple of times, so I thought I would share some possible steps to install it.

h1. Getting Pimki up and running

* install ruby (one click installer, http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyinstaller/)
* install cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/, setup.exe), including the Admin/cygrunsrv package
* install pimki with: gem install pimki --include-dependencies
* configure pimki to run as a service using this command line

Of course you have many other possibilities to run something as a service under windows. I found out that Cygwin has been very reliable for that purpose (it never failed once since I installed it), althought it can seem a bit overkill at first sight.

h1. Setting up a back-up

The data which comes in quickly becomes valuable, so you'll want to set up a back-up.

Once you have Ruby, you also get Rake, which I'm using a lot to achieve reliable scripting (unlike dos commands, error handling is implicit; and reusability is a lot better).

Given the fact that Pimki stores its data as 'snapshots' on the disk (using an in-memory ORM), the backup is very easy to write.

Next step is to automate the task: I just plug it in one of my favourites continuous integration server which is usually already in place for the development (or one can use any other scheduling system).