Running Instiki as a service

April 21, 2006 2:14 AM

Anybody had success running Instiki as a service on XP?

I tried the XP resource kit method as outlined on the tutorial but it doesn't quite work. The service starts but when I go to http://localhost:2500/, I'm presented with a blank page.

There's another method with cygwin on the page as well but as I know nothing about it, I didn't try it.

Anybody's got any idea how to make this work?

posted by mordecai to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

These directions worked for me. You can see me working out path issues in the comments section, too. I still can't remember whether the original directions or my modification was what worked, or something in between.

What results are you getting? In any case, it works now for me, and was totally worth it.
posted by salvia at 9:28 AM on April 21, 2006

Does Instiki work if you run it from the command line?

If so, I'm inclined to think that when you run it as a service Instiki may be unable to find the database DLLs in the lib/native/win32 folder. The instiki.cmd script uses a relative path so you might try making the path fully qualified. I.e., change instiki.cmd so that instead of

set PATH=.\lib\native\win32;%PATH%

it contains

set PATH=C:\wherever\you\put\instiki\lib\native\win32;%PATH%

I just set up Instiki on a Linux machine yesterday and was getting the same behavior (blank page). It turned out that I had a bad copy of the database shared library. The behavior you're seeing is similar enough that, even though they're very different platforms, the root problem could be the same.
posted by santry at 9:58 AM on April 21, 2006

Response by poster: It works fine when I just dbl click on instiki.cmd. But it's the windows that pops up and stays open that bothers me. That's why I wanted to run it as a service instead.

@santry: I tried what you suggested but it didn't work :(

I used to just hide cmd with a vbs script on my previous installation of Instiki. I just got the latest version of Instiki and that trick doesn't work now, hence this lil quest.

btw, regarding the tutorial, when they say:

Add a string value = ”Application”. Set this to the command to run your wiki. c:\ruby\bin\ruby.exe c:\instiki\script\server -e production

They mean that "Value Data" should be "c:\ruby\bin\ruby.exe c:\instiki\script\server -e production". Right? Just checkin'.
posted by mordecai at 8:13 PM on April 21, 2006

Response by poster: @salvia: your solution to call “ruby c:\instiki\instiki.rb” got Instiki running, or so I'm told with "Instiki is started on http://0.0.0.0:2500", etc but interestingly, when I go to http://localhost:2500/, I see a blank page.

Something's going on here...I just can't put a finger on it. Dang. I wish I actually knew what I'm doing!
posted by mordecai at 8:31 PM on April 21, 2006

I got a blank page once when my storage folder was.... lost?something?... after a windows repair/semi-reinstall.

But you're probably over my head if the problem is with the "as a service" part. I just deal with the extra window. I do seem to remember once seeing a good thread about how to get rid of that window, maybe even on Metafilter. (There are a lot of "personal wiki" threads not tagged "instiki.") I Googled for two seconds but have to run.
posted by salvia at 11:00 AM on April 24, 2006