BookStack VPS

Who it suits

Teams and households who want an internal wiki that non-technical people can edit. If your documentation lives in Git as Markdown, a static site generator suits better. Outline needs an outside login provider (Slack, Google, Microsoft or OpenID Connect), which is why we offer BookStack as the one-click wiki.

Which plan

Budget (2 GB) runs BookStack and MariaDB for a small team. Choose Standard for many editors or large uploads; MariaDB is usually the first thing to want more memory.

What we install

BookStack organises documentation into shelves, books, chapters and pages, with a WYSIWYG or Markdown editor. We install it as its guide describes (the release branch, Composer, PHP 8.2 or later and MariaDB) in /var/www/bookstack, served by nginx and PHP-FPM. The database password is in /root/bookstack-db.txt and the admin login in /root/bookstack-admin.txt.

From order to ready

1. Server ready. We email you when the server is running, and you can log in with SSH. The installer starts on that same first boot.
2. Installer running. It logs to /var/log/vps9-setup.log; tail -f it to watch.
3. Application ready. /var/lib/vps9-setup.exit appears when the installer has finished, holding 0 if it worked. BookStack is ready when http://<your IPv4>/ shows its login page and the login in /root/bookstack-admin.txt works.

What you still do

1. Run cat /root/bookstack-admin.txt, open http://<your IPv4>/ and log in.
2. Change the admin's email and name in My Account, and turn on multi-factor authentication.
3. Point a domain at the server and run vps9-https docs.example.com: Certbot gets a certificate (it asks for your email address) and BookStack moves to https://docs.example.com.

Exposure and security

Ports 80 and 443 are open for nginx. BookStack's setup creates admin@admin.com with the password 'password'; the installer replaces that with a generated password before nginx serves the site, so the default login never works. Registration is off by default. Until you add HTTPS your password crosses the network unencrypted, so run vps9-https soon. MariaDB listens on localhost only.

Backups and upgrades

We turn on automatic security updates (security fixes only, no automatic reboot), and PHP-FPM restarts when an update replaces code it runs. BookStack itself is yours to update: in /var/www/bookstack run git pull origin release, composer install --no-dev and php artisan migrate, as its update guide says. Check and patch PHP (PHP2Shell) shows how to check PHP is patched. Back up the database (mariadb-dump bookstack), .env, public/uploads, storage/uploads and themes, and copy them off the server. We run the hardware, the network and the first-boot install; after that, BookStack is yours to run, and we don't manage, update or back it up for you.

Order it from your terminal

$ vps9 servers create --plan budget --image ubuntu-24.04 --app bookstack --hostname web-1 --key key_8f2c

{
  "plan": "budget",
  "image": "ubuntu-24.04",
  "hostname": "web-1",
  "app": "bookstack"
}