Introduction

• Download the latest stable version (2.0)
• Read the docs
• Try a demo - sorry this is currently unavailable until further notice

Roadkill .NET is a lightweight but powerful Wiki platform built on the following foundations:

• .NET 4.5
• jQuery
• ASP.NET MVC 5 with Razor
• Lucene.net search engine
• Creole, Media Wiki and Markdown syntax support
• Bootstrap 3 based UI.
• Supports SQL Server, SQL Server CE, SQL Azure (v1.6+), Sqlite, MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB
• It's themeable and extendable, has documentation, supports Active Directory authentication and is (I hope) extremely easy to use. It's Free Open Source (FOSS)

Roadkill is licensed under the MS-PL license which means it's free to use commercially or privately, but requires you to retain the copyright, trademark and attribution if you intend to distribute it (typically for commercial gain).

• Please see the Roadkill wiki for information on installing
• Please use issues for any discussions, bug reports, enhancements.

Quick start: Azure and AWS

• AWS t2.micro is generally big enough for a small site. Note: this AMI is Windows 2016 July 2018. It may need updating after launch via RDP.
  • US-East-1: ami-0ced7b9074464e093.
  • EU-West-1: ami-021b89cff5ea9314c.
• Azure instructions
• Google Cloud: looking for help

Version 3.0 Roadmap

A lot of changes are on hold because of the current pandemic and the changing .NET Core (now .NET) release cycle.

March 2020

The next version of Roadkill will be Roadkill version 3. Because of the instability of .NET Core over the past 1.5 years, it's been a long time coming. It's currently making good progress now we have the stability of .NET Core 3.0, with so many changes since .NET Framework - as of 2020 this includes the removal of SPA Services so Roadkill is a React/Express application.

It's a major version number because the following major changes are planned:

ASP.NET Core

The next version will be ASP.NET Core only, aimed at Linux hosting for cost and scability.

Enhanced security

Through its ASP.NET Core identity integration, version 3 will support everything that Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity supports

Postgres only

Version 3 will be Postgres only, using Marten as its NoSQL document store. Postgres can be run as Docker container, or is available a service by services such as AWS RDS.

API-first

The new Roadkill will be powered by its RESTful API, rather than version's 2 after-thought approach. This enables far easier plugin and extensibility to exist for Roadkill.

Docker

Roadkill 3 will be a docker image you run, on Linux Docker. With Docker comes built in scalibility, easier versioning,

Postgres for searching

The next version will use Postgres for its search engine, rather than Lucene, removing a lot of complexity and past problems from Roadkill.

No more Creole support

Sorry Creole fans, but supporting 3 different markdown formats is too labour intensive, and CommonMark has come a long and pretty much made Creole redundant, and Mediawiki syntax has zero support for .NET. Looking at commercial wiki engines like Confluence, it ultimately doesn't make a lot of difference what markdown format you support, providing there is good documentation for the syntax.

Version 3 will only support Markdown, using the CommonMark standard via Markdig. CommonMark is a well thought-out and documentated extension of Markdown and has a large community behind it.

Improved editing experience

Because Roadkill is moving to CommonMark, the editor can now be improved to be more user friendly, and have a faster client-side preview. The TUI editor is currently being considered for this: https://github.com/roadkillwiki/roadkill/issues/57

A new theme

A new material-design based theme.

Re-designed file manager

While this may not make the initial v3 release, the plan is to redesign the file manager to emulate the Wordpress 4 file manager.

Better page dialog for adding links

Instead of having to memorize page names, adding links will be similar to Wordpress in finding pages that exist on the site.

As Roadkill is not a commercial project, nor backed commercially, there are no time-frames that can be relied upon. It is essentially me creating it in my spare time.

For Developers

Pre-requisites

Make sure you use the version-2 branch, master is not currently stable

To setup Roadkill on a developer machine, you will need:

• Visual Studio 2015, Community Edition is fine, Roadkill is written using Community Edition.
• IIS
• SQL Server. Your SQL Server installation should be the default instance (not YOURMACHINE\SQLEXPRESS) for the tests to pass. They rely on the connection string being Server=(local);Integrated Security=true;Connect Timeout=5;database=Roadkill
• An NUnit runner (NUnit, Resharper, Dotcover etc.) if you want to run the tests. This is required if you want to contribute.

Fresh install

To get a 'fresh' Roadkill installation on your development machine, you will need to do the following:

• For IIS: create a new site with a .NET 4 application pool.
• If you're using SQL Server: create a database called "roadkill". Run the /lib/Test-databases/roadkill-sqlserver.sql script.
  • If you want to use SQLite or SQLServer CE, empty databases can be found /lib/Test-databases/SqlCE or Sqlite.
• You can also install Roadkill using the unattended url, e.g.: http://localhost/install/Unattended?datastoretype=sqlserver2008&connectionstring=database=roadkill;uid=sa;pwd=Passw0rd;server=.\SQLEXPRESS

Contributing

No contributions are currently being taken until Version 3 is released.

Support on Beerpay

Hey dude! Help me out for a couple of 🍻!