Wikispaces to Flask hosting

Last update: Thu Jun 5 22:25:41 2025

Yes, I'm a tiny bit unhappy with wikispaces hosting:

I have to pay 50 USD per year for getting rid of the commercials
My other wikispaces about guitar and unix have been closed with their new policy
The editor is average (though I'm looking at doing self hosting and writing html in emacs so let's not get too regarding)
Their stupid restrictions on wiki, html, embedding things in their weird components
The css/template editor that is too restrictive, not simple to use at all (to my taste)

So there we are, after a few years (3 or 4?) of good service -because let's be honnest service is good- I want to move to something else, self-hosted, on my DMZ that runs in my toilets in a Super Famicom box (see this project). And yes I thought of being hosted, yes I tried GoDaddy, and I ended up regretting every last dollar (poor service, sluggish, no control, ....). So let's go: how to get out of Wikispaces and host yourself with Flask?

Target: a simple HTML static website that will be as much as possible the same as what you have with Wikispaces. Then maybe take it further.

Export from Wikispaces

Simple: make an HTML export, download it and extract all somewhere.

Preparing the files

Ok your export will be broker unless you've sticked 100% percent with Wikispaces basic designs (which I didn't). So I made this script that fixes a few problems I had:

Path: full site is exported as a subfolder, which I don't want, so change all relative paths
- >>>
Page names: pages with spaces are exported with spaces in the name (huh?) or "%20" as Wikispaces format >> replace with %20 in the URL
- link >>> link

Python script on my github: https://github.com/AlanFromJapan/alanarduinotools/tree/master/Python/Wikispaces2Flask

Install

Code is here https://github.com/AlanFromJapan/alanWebSites

Get the code and git clone it somewhere, say /usr/local/website/
Create a user that will run the website and that's all, call it webuser
Change ownership of everything in /usr/local/website/static to webuser, and not in owner or group of the rest (read only!) in case, so that someone doesn't change the code to execute.
Edit the ini file
and kick the startup script

All content on this site is shared under the MIT licence (do what u want, don't sue me, hat tip appreciated)
electrogeek.tokyo ~ Formerly known as Kalshagar.wikispaces.com and electrogeek.cc (AlanFromJapan [2009 - 2025])