Peter Lyons

Wiki migration from MoinMoin to gitit

January 10, 2011

So I've been hosting my own MoinMoin wiki for a while. I use it pretty heavily to manage my own little projects, packing lists, and whatnot. I used MoinMoin initially because it is written in python and we were using it at work. It has served me reasonably well, but I decide to shut it down and migrate all my data over to gitit instead.

My reasoning for the migration includes the following factors.

Sadly, gitit is not provided as an out of the box Ubuntu x64 package, which I REALLY prefer not to mess with. But alas, as with most webby stuff, I have to accept my fate and deal with manual installation, configuration, maintenance, and upgrade. Other than that fact, gitit has been working well enough so far. I had to write my own init script for it, but that is just annoying as opposed to a serious drawback.

The cool part about this migration was I was able to for the most part script it. I wrote a python script that would take the VERY limited set of MoinMoin syntax that I use (primarily headers, lists, and links) and convert it to markdown. Sadly its seems MoinMoin is one of the few markup formats that pandoc cannot use as input. :-( I also coded my script to start with revision 00000001 (used by MoinMoin) and commit each distinct MoinMoin page revision into git sequentially. Now in my migrated gitit repo, I have the full MoinMoin edit history for every page, which is pretty sweet.