A Markdown folder that is the database of record, with an editor a non-technical person can use, permissions, search, and a five-minute install.
Your pages are .md files in a folder you own. Open that folder in VS Code, back it up with the
tool you already use, copy it to a USB stick — it is yours, and Compendio is the thing that makes it
pleasant to read and write. There is no database server to install, no external service to sign up
for, and nothing to migrate out of later.
- Spanish and English, complete, from the first release.
- Permissions that are explainable: two states per folder, no deny rules, and folders you cannot see are absent rather than greyed out.
- Search that obeys them, in-process, with no external engine.
- Encrypted folders for the router credentials and the incident post-mortems.
- One file to download. Windows Service, systemd unit, or a container — same binary, same behaviour.
Licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later.
A live instance runs at https://compendio.sergiohernandezp.com/ — click through the editor, the folder tree and search without installing anything.
Sign in with admin / Compendio-Demo! — the credentials are public on purpose. Anyone can read
and edit, so treat everything in it as public and please do not put real or personal information
in it. The whole instance is restored to its default state every Monday, so any changes —
content, users, even a changed admin password — are wiped weekly. If someone has left it in a mess
or changed the password, come back after Monday's reset.
- Download
compendio-<version>-win-x64.zipfrom the releases page, then:Unblock-File .\compendio-<version>-win-x64.zip Expand-Archive .\compendio-<version>-win-x64.zip -DestinationPath C:\Compendio
- Right-click the Start button → Terminal (Admin), then:
cd C:\Compendio powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\install-windows.ps1
The installer is in the zip. Three questions, all with defaults; it registers the service, opens the firewall if you want it, starts everything and prints the address and the administrator password. Write the password down — it is shown once.
To try it without installing anything, run .\compendio.exe and open http://localhost:8080.
That path asks you to create the administrator yourself, and stops when you close the window.
Verifying the download is worthwhile, since the binaries are unsigned — see Unsigned releases:
$expected= (Get-Content .\compendio-<version>-win-x64.zip.sha256).Split('')[0]
(Get-FileHash .\compendio-<version>-win-x64.zip -Algorithm SHA256).Hash.ToLower() -eq$expectedunzip compendio-<version>-linux-x64.zip -d /opt/compendio
sha256sum -c compendio-<version>-linux-x64.zip.sha256
chmod +x /opt/compendio/compendio
/opt/compendio/compendioThen open http://localhost:8080. To run it as a systemd unit:
sudo /opt/compendio/compendio installcd deploy
docker compose up -dThen open http://localhost:8080.
The compose file mounts three volumes and keys is one of them, on purpose: it holds the master
encryption key and the session key ring. Losing it makes every encrypted page unreadable and signs
every user out on every restart.
Windows releases ship unsigned, and buying a code-signing certificate is not part of the plan.
The consequence is real: on first run of a downloaded executable, SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC" and you have to click More info → Run anyway. Nothing is wrong; the binary runs identically either way.
What we publish instead is a SHA-256 checksum beside every artifact, which is the honest substitute for a signature and is a stronger check than a signature you did not verify. Note that a self-signed code-signing certificate would not remove the dialog — SmartScreen reputation comes from a publicly trusted CA. It is genuinely useful in exactly one case: an organization can sign the binary with its own certificate and push that certificate to its machines' Trusted Publishers store by group policy. That is your PKI and your decision, and it costs nothing either.
| Editing | Rich text by default. Nobody sees ##, ** or |---| unless they ask for the Markdown view. Paste from Word, Outlook, Confluence or a web page and it becomes clean Markdown. |
| The folder | Every page is a .md file with YAML front matter. Edit one in VS Code and it shows up in the browser within two seconds. |
| Permissions | Access rules attach to folders. A folder either inherits — and can only add access — or is restricted to exactly the people and groups you list. There are no deny rules, because deny rules are where permission systems stop being explainable. |
| Search | SQLite FTS5, in-process. sesion finds sesión; 192.168.1.1 and VPN-Site-A survive as searchable units. The permission check is part of the query, so a result count never tells you about pages you cannot open. |
| Encrypted folders | AES-256-GCM, keys the instance generates for itself. Only administrators can edit inside one. |
| History | A snapshot on every change, including changes made in the content folder. Restoring writes a new version, so a mistaken restore is itself undoable. |
| Bilingual | Spanish and English throughout, including the setup wizard and the CLI. Pages can be tagged with a language and linked to their translations. |
| AI, optional | Off until you paste in an endpoint, and absent until then rather than greyed out. One OpenAI-compatible URL covers Ollama, Groq, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI and LM Studio — point it at Ollama on your own server and nothing leaves the machine. Improve writing, draft a page from rough notes, summarize, translate, ask the wiki. Every result is a proposal you accept or discard. Daily per-person and per-instance caps, so a metered endpoint cannot surprise you. Setting it up |
| HTTPS | compendio cert create issues a certificate for this machine. No certificate authority, no internet, no purchase. |
No SMTP. No real-time collaborative editing. No plugin marketplace. No native mobile apps. No multi-tenancy. No required external service, ever — not for search, not for AI, not for authentication.
compendio Start the server
compendio install|uninstall Register as a Windows Service or systemd unit
compendio doctor [--json] Check this instance and report what is wrong, in plain language
compendio backup --out <file> Content plus a consistent database copy
compendio restore --in <file>
compendio reindex Rebuild the search index from the content folder
compendio cert create Issue a self-signed TLS certificate
compendio reset-admin-password Local-console recovery — there is no email
Every verb is scriptable: no prompt that a flag or an environment variable cannot answer.
You need the .NET 10 SDK and Node 22+, and the Common.Mediator repository checked out
beside this one.
git clone https://github.com/shernandezp/Common.Mediator.git Mediator
git clone https://github.com/shernandezp/Compendio.git
cd Compendio
dotnet build # builds the SPA into src/Server/wwwroot too
dotnet test# Development, not Production: there is no launchSettings.json, so a bare `dotnet run` starts# without appsettings.Development.json and shows the setup wizard instead of the seeded admin.
ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=Development dotnet run --project src/ServerThen open http://localhost:8080 and sign in as admin / Compendio!Dev1.
To skip the client build (useful when only touching the server):
dotnet build -p:SkipClientBuild=truedocs/development.md covers the rest: hot reload against a running server,
resetting the data directory, which tests need git on PATH, how to exercise each v1 feature, and
how to regenerate the committed API contract.
Users get their documentation inside the product, under the ? button in the header — how to navigate, search, write, and the lifecycle features, plus a section for administrators. It ships in every language the interface does. The files below are for whoever installs and maintains it.
| docs/install.md | The five-minute install, in detail, per platform |
| docs/development.md | Running it locally, hot reload, tests, trying each feature |
| docs/api.md | The HTTP API |
| docs/translating.md | Adding a language |
Compendio is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or
later. Because it is a network-accessible program, the
licence requires the running instance to offer its source: it does, from GET /api/v1/about and
from the footer of every page.