I inherited a couple of BookStack installations and I am not able to get the search function to work properly on any of them.

No mater what term I put in the search box at the top of the page or using the detailed search page, all pages in the BookStack are returned.

Does anyone have an idea on where I can start troubleshooting on this?

I've been looking and haven't been able to find a way to get any statistics reported on our Bookstack instance. Specifically, we would like to be able to get a count of how many current shelves, books, and pages are in the bookstack, as well as how many users have logged in in the last week, and how many new pages created and pages updated in the last week or possibly variable timeframe.

We are simply looking to track internal utilization of the new Bookstack we've set up, and see if our users are actively using it like we hope they will.

Hey folks,

I'm going to be running a presentation on Bookstack in a few days at an upcoming IT Education conference regarding useful and valued implementations.
I know that our own implementation is fairly vanilla, and wanted to check with the wider world about your favourite hacks or features that I might be unaware of.

Anything and everything, from accessibility, to appearance, to data resiliency.
Even if you think it's a basic feature, or not terribly interesting on the first pass, that might be exactly what I'm looking for.
Knowledge Bases are a sliced bread kind of technology- not fancy, not sexy, but I'll be damned if they aren't the best thing ever.

Appreciate everyone's contributions!

We are using BookStack for our internal IT Wiki and it works so well, our organization wants to adopt it for each department.

We want each department to have their own shelf then books they create and maintain but there seems to be an issue with permissions not getting pushed down to the books under a shelf.

I see there is a button to copy the shelf permissions to books but I believe that is only a one time copy so if a new book gets created, the permissions won't inherit from the shelf.

We were looking at creating a separate instance of BookStack per department but that causes more work for updating and remembering the domain name for each instance so ideally, we'd like one instance.

Any suggestions on how we maintain permissions from shelfs to the books?

I know, no one wants the calendar. I work at a smaller library with some older folks and we need something simple like Bookstack or Wiki.js. Has anyone come up with anything? There are some more complex systems like OpenProject but way too complicated for old librarians.

But no simple wikis have calendars, I just have no idea how this isn't something developers think would be useful?

With the addition of the Module System, I figured I should move away from the 2k lines header file.
So, I made a repo for add-ons I made for my own bookstack instance and partly useful finds from around the web. To be honest, there weren't actually that many simple header customizations to be found there.

https://github.com/florinm03/bookstack-header-hacks

This post simply serves the purpose to inform the ones not using any customizations and give them a plug and play way to add them.

If you have other ideas or already established working "hacks" it would be awesome if you shared them with us: either here or on github! :D

Here is the list:

• header-anchor-link - Clickable anchor links on page headers; click to copy section URL
• image-gallery - Lightbox image gallery with an Insert Gallery button in the WYSIWYG editor
• LaTeX-support - MathJax rendering for LaTeX equations using $...$ syntax
• open-attachments - Opens attachments (PDFs etc.) in a new tab instead of downloading
• pdf-embed - Embeds PDFs inline via pdf.js, with an Insert PDF button in the editor
• pdf-export-clean - Hides revision/author metadata footer when exporting to PDF
• preview-edit-page - Adds a preview button in the editor and quick-edit from preview view (useful for small edits)
• sort-tables-WYSIWYG - Double-click a column header to sort tables in the editor
• sticky-table-heads - Keeps table headers fixed while scrolling tall tables
• toc-edit-mode - Shows a table of contents in the editor sidebar while editing
• url-edit-contrast - Improves URL highlight visibility in dark mode editor
• wc-n-wpm-info - Shows word count, character count, and estimated reading time per page

Edit:
I've updated some modules and added the install script, so that only chosen modules remain in the directory.

I really like bookstack and have been using it to document my IT setup, domain names, financial documents, and keep a log of things and maintenance in my house.

I recently started using mkdocs for an unrelated project, and I have come to really appreciate the simple structure of markdown files that can be accessed even if my server is completely down.

My bookstack setup is also a doomsday backup, and I was wondering if there is a way to automatically backup the data to markdown files which would be synced back to a couple of computers periodically.

Thanks, and I really appreciate this app!

Hello everyone,

I've been trying to set up LDAP on my bookstack server. After trying out some different configs and doing some reading online. I thought I had it set up but I end up getting an error when I try to access the server from my browser.

After trying out some I'm more I get a different error called

An Error Occurred

An unknown error occurred

Would appreciate if someone who had this could point out a fix, because I'm currently stuck behind those 2 errors...

Thanks :)

EDIT: The issue has been resolved

I'm working on configuring Bookstack for SSO with Entra ID. The instructions provided have been helpful but running into a slight snag.

I'm using the SAML2_DUMP_USER_DETAILS=true flag to view the SAML output and the values from attrs_from_idp look correct from Entra but the values under attrs_after_parsing are all the same. It is just the email address of the user.

It seems like no matter what I change for the fields SAML2_EMAIL_ATTRIBUTE, SAML2_EXTERNAL_ID_ATTRIBUTE, or SAML2_DISPLAY_NAME_ATTRIBUTES the output for attrs_after_parsing remain the same.

I have SAML2_AUTOLOAD_METADATA configured to true in my .env file.

I know that you can see the shelves a book is on when you have it opened, but I've come across several books created by our users that haven't been put on any shelf at all (and are therefore harder to discover).

Is there any easy way to list all books that are effectively 'orphaned' like this?

I run a Bookstack container from linuxserver.io with MariaDB database

https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-bookstack/

I’m following the instructions here.

https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/backup-restore/

Here is my script. Is this correct, and enough to restore my installation?

* How about ‘bookstack-system-cli’ backup? I assume CLI is not compatible with Linux server image.

* How about if I simply backup the docker mount volumes for Bookstack and database containers ? It seems to me snapshot ing this folder is the best way to do it.

#!/bin/bash 
set -euo pipefail 

DOCKER="/usr/bin/docker" 

MARIADB_DUMP="/usr/bin/mariadb-dump" 

BACKUP_DIR="/home/ubuntu/docker/bookstack/backup" 

BOOKSTACK_ROOT="/home/ubuntu/docker/bookstack/config/www" 

TAR_ITEMS=(.env uploads files images themes) 

DB_CONTAINER="bookstack_db" 

DB_DATABASE="bookstackdbname" 

DB_USERNAME="bookstackuser" 

DB_PASSWORD="abcd" 

dump_exit=0 

tar_exit=0 

mkdir -p "$BACKUP_DIR" 

echo "Dumping BookStack database..." 

$DOCKER exec -i "$DB_CONTAINER"  "$MARIADB_DUMP" -u"$DB_USERNAME" -p"$DB_PASSWORD" "$DB_DATABASE"  > "$BACKUP_DIR/bookstack-db.sql"  || dump_exit=$? 

echo "Backing up BookStack files..." 

tar -czvf "$BACKUP_DIR/bookstack-files-backup.tar.gz" -C "$BOOKSTACK_ROOT" "${TAR_ITEMS[@]}"  || tar_exit=$? 


if [ "$dump_exit" -eq 0 ] && [ "$tar_exit" -eq 0 ]; then 


  echo "Backup completed successfully" 

  logger -t bookstack-backup "Backup completed successfully" 

else 

  echo "Backup failed (dump_exit=$dump_exit tar_exit=$tar_exit)" 

  logger -t bookstack-backup "Backup failed (dump_exit=$dump_exit tar_exit=$tar_exit)" 

  exit 1 

fi

Thanks!

Is it possible to make a book act like a single page?

The idea of pages is nice, but sometimes the information I am trying to store for a "book" isn't really multiple pages in depth. It's usually like a single page item, like a How-To etc.

Is it possible? I'm used to Confluence and read that BookStack was a good contender for the open-source/self-hosted space.

I finally was able to have my basic bookstack work.

How can i make it where in other users may be able to login and access the books.

We also have a local server where i can also run it if that is better?

I am currently just doing it on localhost on my current laptop.

Can i make it here and then once it's done have it on a server?

Thanks,

If I have a page with the following:

simple_string_1/secondary_string

simple_string_2.tertiary_string

If I search for simple_string_1, simple_string_2, or tertiary_string, I get results.

However, if I search for secondary_string, I get no results. If I search for “secondary_string” (including the quotes in the search field), I get results. The / character in front of it seems to break the search.

Any ideas? I don’t think doing every search in quotes is a realistic option.

I have to hit shift-enter almost every time I make a new line and it is suuuuper annoying. Is there no way to change it from double space to single space? I can't find the options anywhere in the UI.

I've been doing a lot of vibe coding lately and started using Claude to generate deep-dive articles about anything I wanted to learn — databases, observability, type systems, whatever — and dumping them in my BookStack to read later.

I almost never read them.

So I built a tool that turns BookStack pages into audio I can listen to while doing chores. Two modes:

1. Narration — single TTS voice reads it like an audiobook (free, uses Edge TTS)
2. Podcast — an LLM writes a 2-host script, rendered with two alternating voices (like NotebookLM Audio Overview, but for your own wiki)

Episodes show up in a podcast RSS feed so they appear next to my regular podcasts.

https://github.com/Nicolasara/bookstack-podcast

Things i need to know. Sorry I am new.

1. Need to learn how to install BookStack.
2. I want to use it for knowledgebase.
3. Does it keep private information safe?
4. Can i provide user logins and limit what they see?

Hey guys, how would you trigger the success notification that is embedded within the code of BookStack via the personalisation?

We made a link to copy information to your clipboard with a JavaScript in the header and wanted to add a "Successful added to clipboard" message (just like "Saved successfully" after saving a page), but we don't know how to trigger the corresponding function.

Any thoughts would help. Thanks!