Self-host BookStack
A simple, genuinely open-source documentation wiki organized into shelves, books, and pages — easy to run and easy for non-technical teams to use.
Key facts
Pick BookStack when a non-technical team has to keep documentation alive: content lives in books, chapters and pages, the page editor is a plain WYSIWYG with an optional Markdown editor instead, and roles, permissions and built-in MFA come in the MIT-licensed core. It is a classic PHP + MySQL/MariaDB app, so it runs happily on 512 MB — but the Docker images are community-maintained, not the project's own. If you want a Notion-style real-time editor, look at Docmost or Outline instead.
Follow the BookStack deploy guide →What you need
- Any VPS with at least 512 MB of RAM
- A domain you control — most self-hosted setups need HTTPS in front of them
- Under an hour if you've used Docker before
Paid link — we earn a commission if you shop through it.
Install with Docker Compose
Save this as compose.yml and run docker compose up -d:
# BookStack + MariaDB (linuxserver image)
services:
bookstack:
image: lscr.io/linuxserver/bookstack:latest
ports: ["6875:80"]
environment: { APP_URL: http://SERVER_IP:6875, DB_HOST: db, DB_USER: bookstack, DB_PASS: secret, DB_DATABASE: bookstack }
db: { image: lscr.io/linuxserver/mariadb:latest }
# docker compose up -d → http://SERVER_IP:6875What you take on
BookStack is one of the calmer wikis to operate, but four things in its own documentation shape how you run it:
An alternative to
Head-to-head
Simple and truly open vs. slick and real-time.
A real-time Notion-style wiki with a paid ring vs. the simplest fully free docs wiki.
A Markdown-first Node.js wiki with an official image and a big module set vs. the simplest shelves-and-books docs wiki.
