Knowledge Wiki Setup

Knowledge Wiki Setup

The Why

Working with the AI, I am building many, many more digital assets (Containers, and other). Though this is very cool to be able to move at this speed, I need to keep track of what is being done. Working with an AI, you can be a very light coordinator to get to the solution, and pay little attention to the details, or guide it like a micro-manager. Ether way, how to get back to what you created, or expand on it needs documentation.

I am working it this way. I have a staff of AI working for me. They are generally good, but need guidance. When they are done, they publish the product and the Documentation. That way if we need to revisit the project, the new team (new AI session) can pick up and continue on.

What Was Built

A file-based wiki (MkDocs Material) served at knowledge.cossaboon.net to capture institutional knowledge for the homelab — containers, infrastructure, projects, and the AI prompts that made them work.

Why

Documentation created during AI-assisted sessions was living only in Claude’s memory files (ephemeral per-project context). In 6 months, with different AI tools or a different desktop setup, that knowledge would be lost. The wiki provides a durable, searchable home for it that survives tool churn.

Architecture

flowchart TD
    Mac["Mac\n/Volumes/knowledge"]
    NAS3["NAS3\n10.42.42.3\n/volume1/knowledge"]
    Gitea["Gitea\n10.10.20.82:3000\nkcossabo/knowledge"]
    Komodo["Komodo Core\n10.10.15.26:9120"]
    Container["knowledge container\n10.10.20.85:8000\nSpaceDock"]
    NPM["NGINX Proxy Manager"]
    User["Browser\nknowledge.cossaboon.net"]

    Mac -->|"NFS mount (write)"| NAS3
    NAS3 -->|"NFS mount (read)"| Container
    Mac -->|"git push (kcommit)"| Gitea
    Mac -->|"POST /execute/RestartStack"| Komodo
    Komodo -->|"docker restart knowledge"| Container
    Container -->|"MkDocs re-reads all files on startup"| NAS3
    Container --> NPM
    NPM --> User

• Content store: NAS share (knowledge) mounted via NFS on both Mac and SpaceDock
• Presentation: squidfunk/mkdocs-material container on SpaceDock, reads NFS mount directly
• Version history: Git repo on the NAS share, remote at gitea.cossaboon.net/kcossabo/knowledge
• Deployment: Komodo Stack on SpaceDock (spacedock/knowledge/compose.yml in homelab-containers repo)
• Domain: knowledge.cossaboon.net via NPM reverse proxy → 10.10.20.85:8000

Key Decisions

MkDocs over Wiki.js or Outline — file-first, no database, container mounts NAS and serves immediately. mkdocs serve watches for file changes and live-reloads with no rebuild trigger needed.

NAS mount as source of truth, not Gitea clone — MkDocs reads directly from the NAS. Git is parallel (history/backup only). This means dropping a file on the NAS immediately appears in the wiki, no push/deploy cycle required.

Separate repos — knowledge (content) is its own Gitea repo. The homelab-containers repo only holds the compose.yml for the container itself, following the existing pipeline pattern.

No Build resource in Komodo — public image (squidfunk/mkdocs-material), nothing to build. Stack only.

AI Prompt

To see the AI prompts I used and what was learned, see AI Prompts & Context.

For a full breakdown of what went wrong and how it was fixed, see Lessons Learned.