[opensourcedex]

BookStack is a free, open source documentation & knowledge base project written in PHP and released under MIT. It has 19,048 GitHub stars, 2,422 forks and 3 open issues, and was last pushed 11 hours ago. On this registry it ranks #7 of 40 tracked projects in Documentation & Knowledge Base, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available. It gained 7 stars over the last 3 tracked days.

What is BookStack?

What it is

BookStack is a self-hosted documentation platform written in PHP on top of the Laravel framework, released under the MIT license. It is described by its maintainers as an opinionated platform for storing and organising information and documentation, and it is distributed as an open-source project whose development is now managed on Codeberg. The project has existed for roughly eleven years and carries a substantial community footprint, with more than nineteen thousand stars and over two thousand forks recorded against its repository history.

The concrete problem it addresses is the gap between a general-purpose wiki and a documentation tool that a non-technical contributor can actually use. BookStack aims to provide a pleasant and simple out-of-the-box experience, where new users to an instance find the interface intuitive and only basic word-processing skills are required to begin creating content. It deliberately offers advanced power features to those who want them while keeping those features from interfering with the core simple experience, which is the trade-off most documentation platforms handle poorly.

Key capabilities

  • Stores and organises information and documentation as its primary purpose, rather than treating documentation as a secondary feature.
  • Ships an opinionated structure, meaning the platform makes content-organisation decisions for the user instead of requiring configuration from scratch.
  • Provides an out-of-the-box experience intended to be pleasant and simple for first-time users of an instance.
  • Requires only basic word-processing skills from contributors, lowering the barrier for non-technical authors.
  • Exposes advanced power features for users who want them, without letting those features intrude on the default simple workflow.
  • Built on Laravel and PHP, so it runs on a widely deployed web application stack.
  • Maintains a stable and easy upgrade path as part of its stated development philosophy.

Who uses it and how

  • Self-hosters running their own instance, as indicated by the selfhosted topic and the project's positioning as a platform rather than a hosted service.
  • Teams and individuals who need a wiki-style knowledge base, reflected in the wiki topic attached to the repository.
  • Organisations that want internal documentation stored on infrastructure they control rather than on a vendor's servers.
  • Contributors who need to write and organise content without learning a markup-heavy or developer-oriented toolchain.
  • Administrators who value a slow, continuous evolution model with predictable upgrades over rapid breaking change.

Getting started

Installation instructions are published on the official website at bookstackapp.com, which also hosts the full documentation

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

BookStack

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A platform for storing and organising information and documentation. Details for BookStack can be found on the official website at https://www.bookstackapp.com/.

📚 Project Definition

BookStack is an opinionated documentation platform that provides a pleasant and simple out-of-the-box experience. New users to an instance should find the experience intuitive and only basic word-processing skills should be required to get involved in creating content on BookStack. The platform should provide advanced power features to those that desire it, but they should not interfere with the core simple user experience.

BookStack is not designed as an extensible platform to be used for purposes that differ from the statement above.

In regard to development philosophy, BookStack has a relaxed, open & positive approach. We aim to slowly yet continuously evolve the platform while providing a stable & easy upgrade path.

You can read more about the project and its origins in our FAQ here.

🌟 Project Sponsors

Shown below are our bronze, silver and gold project sponsors. Big thanks to these companies for supporting the project. Note: The listed services are not tested, vetted nor supported by the official BookStack project in any manner.

Project donation details - GitHub Sponsors Page - Ko-fi Page

Gold Sponsor
Diagrams.net
onyx.app
Bronze Sponsors
Cloudabove Practicali
Stellar Hosted NETWAYS Web Services
Practinet Route4Me - Route Optimizer and Route Planner Software
phamos SiteSpeakAI
Admin Intelligence BookHost

🛠️ Development & Testing

Please see our development docs for full details regarding work on the BookStack source code.

If you're just looking to customize or extend your own BookStack instance, take a look at our Hacking BookStack documentation page for details on various options to achieve this without altering the BookStack source code.

Details about BookStack's versioning scheme and the general release process can be found here.

🌎 Translations

Translations for text within BookStack are managed through the BookStack project on Crowdin. Some strings have colon-prefixed variables such as :userName. Leave these values as they are as they will be replaced at run-time.

Please use Crowdin to contribute translations instead of opening a pull request. The translations within the working codebase can be out-of-date, and merging via code can cause conflicts & sync issues. If for some reason you can't use Crowdin feel free to open an issue to discuss alternative options.

If you'd like a new language to be added to Crowdin, for you to be able to provide translations for, please open a new issue here.

Please note, translations in BookStack are provided to the "Crowdin Global Translation Memory" which helps BookStack and other projects with finding translations. If you are not happy with contributing to this then providing translations to BookStack, even manually via code, is not advised.

🎁 Contributing, Issues & Pull Requests

Feel free to create issues to request new features or to report bugs & problems. Just please follow the template given when creating the issue.

Pull requests are welcome but, unless it's a small tweak, it may be best to open the pull request early or create an issue for your intended change to discuss how it will fit into the project and plan out the merge. Just because a feature request exists, or is tagged, does not mean that feature would be accepted into the core project.

Pull requests should be created from the development branch since they will be merged back into development once done. Please do not build from or request a merge into the release branch as this is only for publishing releases. If you are looking to alter CSS or JavaScript content please edit the source files found in resources/. Any CSS or JS files within public are built from these source files and therefore should not be edited directly. See the [Development & Testing](#

readme truncated — read the full docs on github

Frequently asked questions

Is BookStack free to use?

BookStack is open source under the MIT licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does BookStack do?

NOW MANAGED ON CODEBERG

What is BookStack written in?

BookStack is primarily written in PHP. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack, and it has 19,048 GitHub stars.