#413 VQWiki

About the Very Quick Wiki Java-based WikiWikiWeb clone. The project is now officially abandoned, and I address exporting data from VQWiki.

Notes

Very Quick Wiki is a Java Server Pages based WikiWikiWeb clone. The project is now officially abandoned, with the last release 2.8.1 in 2009-03-01.

I am making these notes in 2026 - long after I last used VQWiki - so I’m not going to try and get it running again.

I used VQWiki for a few years as my personal notes system, having previously used Lotus Notes for this purpose. Around 2009 I moved to a combination of Google Docs and GitHub for my notes.

I do recall loving the WikiWikiWeb-style of personal notes recording, but the infrastructure required to run VQWiki was a significant impediment.

I did use https://tiddlywiki.com/ for a while, and liked the simplicity: TiddlyWiki stores its data and code in a single HTML file, requiring no installs, no external dependencies, just a web browser. Ultimately though, I’ve gravitated to GitHub for all my notes as it is both simple, yet can handle much more than just text.

Data Storage

By default, VQWiki stores data in text files. The file-system is set up in the user’s home directory. Every topic gets written to one text file named as the topic with a “txt” extension.

VQWiki can be easily configured to use database persistence, which leads to much better performance for larger wikis. The default database choice is MySQL

Export

VQWiki provided an Export2HTML feature as a Special Page:

You can save the entire wiki to a set of HTML files and download them for local archiving. The contents of the wiki will appear as a single large ZIP archive, which you can then save to your local hard drive.

If you are no longer running VQWiki, this is not much help of course

A Simple Export Script

I wrote a little export script in Perl to dump my VQWiki database. IIRC I not longer had a working VQWiki installation, but did have access to the MySQL database.

See vqx.pl.

Credits and References