wiki-search

GitHub wikis are great for docs but have no real search. wiki-search adds it: a bookmarklet (plus a hosted search page) that searches a wiki and takes you straight to the matching section — without moving your docs off the wiki.

▶ Try the live demo & install the bookmarklet

Use it

• Search a wiki. Drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar, then open any GitHub wiki that has a wiki-search index and search — each result jumps you to the exact section. (Try it now on this project's own wiki — no install needed.)

• Add search to your own wiki. Build an index from your Markdown — needs Node, nothing to install:

  npx wiki-search-index --wiki ./your-wiki   # → your-wiki/search-index.json

  Commit that search-index.json into your wiki, then add a one-line Search section. Got API docs in your README? Run from your repo root and add --file README.md to fold it into the same index — results deep-link to the rendered file on GitHub. Full guide — including keeping the index fresh — Add search to your wiki.

How it works

The bookmarklet opens the search page on its own GitHub Pages origin, so the wiki page's security policy can't block it. There it loads a small JSON index built from the wiki's Markdown and links each result with a text fragment, so your browser scrolls to — and, where supported, highlights — the matched phrase. By default a result re-uses your current tab; Back returns you. The index carries its own URL template, so the same app works for any site with no hardcoded host.

| Path | What | | -------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------- | | index.html | Landing + bookmarklet-install page (the Pages root). | | app/ | The search page (loads + validates an index, searches, links out). | | builder/ | wiki-index CLI: Markdown → the JSON index. | | engine/ | Search core: MiniSearch (vendored), with a zero-dep fallback. | | bookmarklet/ | The bookmarklet — one constant, imported by the app + install page. |

Run locally: python3 -m http.server from the repo root, then open http://localhost:8000/app/?wiki=uhop/wiki-search.

Release notes

• 0.2.0 New: fold a repo file (e.g. a README that doubles as API docs) into the index with --file; fix: headings with links or image badges now slug like GitHub.
• 0.1.3 Fix: HTML entities in headings now decode too, so anchors and section titles match GitHub (0.1.1 only handled body text).
• 0.1.2 Set the published CLI's execute bit (tidy hygiene; npm already chmods bins on install).
• 0.1.1 HTML entities (—, Ӓ, …) are decoded so they no longer pollute the index.
• 0.1.0 Initial release of the wiki-search-index builder.

For the full history see the wiki: Release notes.

License

BSD-3-Clause