ikiwiki and big files

My website has 214 hand written html, 1500 of pictures and a few, err sorry, 114 video files. All this takes around 1.5 GB of disk space at the moment. Plain html files take 1.7 MB and fit naturally into git.

But what about the picture and video files?

Pictures are mostly static and rarely need to be edited after first upload, wasting a megabyte or two after an edit while having them in git doesn't really matter. Videos on the other hand are quite large from megabytes to hundreds. Sometimes I re-encode them from the original source with better codec parameters and just replace the files under html root so they are accessible from the same URL. So having a way to delete a 200 MB file and upload a new one with same name and access URL is what I need. And it appears git has trouble erasing commits from history, or requires some serious gitfoo and good backups of the original repository.

So which ikiwiki backend could handle piles of large binary files? Or should I go for a separate data/binary blob directory next to ikiwiki content?

Further complication is my intention to keep URL compatibility with old handwritten and ikiwiki based site. Sigh, tough job but luckily just a hobby.

-Mikko

ps. here's how to calculate space taken by html, picture and video files:

~/www$ unset sum; for size in $( for ext in htm html txt xml log; \
do find . -iname "*$ext" -exec stat -c "%s" \{\} \; ; done | xargs ); \
do sum=$(( $sum + $size )); done ; echo $sum
1720696
~/www$ unset sum; for size in $( for ext in jpg gif jpeg png; \
do find . -iname "*$ext" -exec stat -c "%s" \{\} \; ; done | xargs ); \
do sum=$(( $sum + $size )); done ; echo $sum
46032184
~/www$ unset sum; for size in $( for ext in avi dv mpeg mp4; \
do find . -iname "*$ext" -exec stat -c "%s" \{\} \; ; done | xargs ); \
do sum=$(( $sum + $size )); done ; echo $sum
1351890888

One approach is to use the underlay plugin to configure a separate underlay directory, and put the large files in there. Those files will then be copied to the generated wiki, but need not be kept in revision control. (Or could be revision controlled in a separate repository -- perhaps one using a version control system that handles large files better than git; or perhaps one that you periodically blow away the old history to in order to save space.)

BTW, the hardlink setting is a good thing to enable if you have large files, as it saves both disk space and copying time. --Joey

Can underlay plugin handle the case that source and destination directories are the same? I'd rather have just one copy of these underlay files on the server.

No, but enabling hardlinks accomplishes the same effect. --Joey

And did I goof in the setup file since I got this:

$ ikiwiki -setup blog.setup -rebuild --verbose
Can't use string ("/home/users/mcfrisk/www/blog/med") as an ARRAY ref while
"strict refs" in use at 
/home/users/mcfrisk/bin/share/perl/5.10.0/IkiWiki/Plugin/underlay.pm line 41.
$ grep underlay blog.setup 
    add_plugins => [qw{goodstuff websetup comments blogspam html sidebar underlay}],
    underlaydir => '/home/users/mcfrisk/bin/share/ikiwiki/basewiki',
    # underlay plugin
    # extra underlay directories to add
    add_underlays => '/home/users/mcfrisk/www/blog/media',
$ egrep "(srcdir|destdir)" blog.setup 
    srcdir => '/home/users/mcfrisk/blog',
    destdir => '/home/users/mcfrisk/www/blog',
    # allow symlinks in the path leading to the srcdir (potentially insecure)
    allow_symlinks_before_srcdir => 1,
    # directory in srcdir that contains directive descriptions

-Mikko

The plugin seems to present a bad default value in the setup file. (Fixed in git.) A correct configuration would be:

    add_underlays => ['/home/users/mcfrisk/www/blog/media'],

Umm, doesn't quite fix this yet:

$ ikiwiki -setup blog.setup -v
Can't use an undefined value as an ARRAY reference at /home/users/mcfrisk/bin/share/perl/5.10.0/IkiWiki
/Plugin/underlay.pm line 44.
$ grep underlay blog.setup 
    add_plugins => [qw{goodstuff websetup comments blogspam html sidebar underlay}],
    underlaydir => '/home/users/mcfrisk/bin/share/ikiwiki/basewiki',
    # underlay plugin
    # extra underlay directories to add
    add_underlays => ['/home/users/mcfrisk/www/blog/media'],
$ ikiwiki --version
ikiwiki version 3.20091032

-Mikko

Yeah, I've fixed that in git, but you can work around it with this: --Joey

templatedirs => [],