It was suggested that using ikiwiki as an alternative to pastebin services could be useful, especially if you want pastes to not expire and be cloneable.

All you really need is a special purpose ikiwiki instance that you commit to by git. But a web interface for pasting could also be nice.

There could be a directive that inserts a paste form onto a page. The form would have a big textarea for pasting into, and might also have a file upload button (for uploading instead of pasting). It could also copy the page edit form's dropdown of markup types, which would be especially useful if using the highlight plugin to support programming languages. The default should probably be txt, not mdwn, if the txt plugin is enabled.

(There's a lot of overlap between that and editpage of course .. similar to the overlap between the comment form and editpage.)

When posted, the form would just come up with a new, numeric subpage of the page it appears on, and save the paste there.

Another thing that might be useful is a "copy" (or "paste as new") action on the action bar. This would take an existing paste and copy it into the paste edit form, for editing and saving under a new id.


A sample wiki configuration using this might be:

  • enable highlight and txt
  • enable anonok so anyone can paste; lock anonymous users down to only creating new pastes, not editing other pages
  • disable modification of existing pastes (how? disabling editpage would work, but that would disallow setting up anonymous git push)
  • enable comments, so that each paste can be commented on
  • enable getsource, so the source to a paste can easily be downloaded
  • optionally, enable untrusted git push