Karpathy's LLM Wiki got everyone excited. But one thing was missing: a way to look at it. Your agents can read and navigate the articles, but you can't see what they're doing.
So I built Wiki OS. It's free, it's open source, and it runs in your browser.
I build useful things like this with AI every week.
Subscribe on YouTubeYou get a clean view of your wiki, a graph of how your articles connect, and stats about your vault. The code is on GitHub: Wiki OS.
What it is
Wiki OS takes an Obsidian vault and turns it into a local web app. An Obsidian vault is just a folder of markdown notes, so any folder like that works too.
On GitHub I describe it as a UI layer for Karpathy's LLM Wiki. That wiki is a folder of markdown notes. Wiki OS is the part you look at.
Once it's running, you get:
- A homepage with featured notes, recent notes and people highlights
- Search that runs on your machine
- Clean article pages for each note
- A graph view of your notes
- A stats view
Why it's useful
Notes pile up fast. After a while it gets hard to see what you have, or how one note links to another.
Wiki OS builds a search index of your whole folder. Then it watches the folder, so when you add or change a note, the index updates on its own. You don't have to rebuild anything by hand.
It's also local-first. There's no cloud account and nothing to sign up for. Your notes stay on your computer.
What you need
- A folder of markdown notes, like an Obsidian vault. No vault yet? Wiki OS comes with a small demo vault you can try first.
- Git and Node.js on your computer. Node comes with npm, which the setup uses.
- Or Docker, if you'd rather run it in a container.
How to set it up
Open your terminal and paste this:
git clone https://github.com/Ansub/wiki-os.git wiki-os && cd wiki-os && npm run first-runThat downloads Wiki OS, installs what it needs and starts it. It opens in your browser and walks you through picking your vault. You can pick the demo vault on the first run if you just want to look around.
Wiki OS remembers the vault you picked. Next time, start it from the same folder with:
npm startRun it with Docker
If you use Docker, this starts Wiki OS with the demo vault:
docker compose up --buildTo use your own notes, open docker-compose.yml in the project folder and find this line:
- ./sample-vault:/vault:roReplace ./sample-vault with the path to your own vault, like this:
- /Users/your-name/Documents/MyVault:/vault:roLeave WIKI_ROOT: /vault as it is.
People pages
Wiki OS can pick out the notes that are about people and show them on the homepage. It doesn't guess by default. It only counts a note as a person if you've marked it that way, in one of these ways:
- A frontmatter key like
person,people,type,kindorentity - A tag like
person,people,biographyorbiographies - A folder like
people/,person/,biographies/orbiography/
You can change this in wiki-os.config.ts with people.mode. explicit is the safe default. hybrid lets it guess a bit more. off hides People completely.
Things to know
- It never rewrites your notes. Your choices, like which vault you picked and any changes to People, are saved in
~/.wiki-os/config.json. The search index lives in~/.wiki-os/indexes/. - You can switch off the file watching. Set
WIKIOS_DISABLE_WATCH=1if you don't want it to watch your folder. - You can reindex by hand if you ever need to.
- It's MIT licensed. Use it, change it, build on it.
Want to help build it? Run npm run dev instead of npm start. That's the contributor mode. Everything else is in the Wiki OS repo on GitHub.
