MoinMoin To Git (Markdown) Wiki Converter

App to convert a MoinMoin wiki file tree into a git based wiki as used on github, gitlab or gitea.

Current Version

Version: 0.8.0

Status

This was required for a one-off conversion. I'm not doing any further work on it - if anyone wishes to take this over then please just ask.

Translation Method

Originally the intention was to translate purely by converting the MoinMoin markup to markdown markup - using the MoinMoin data retrieved from the filesystem.

However, although it makes determining the overall page list and revision list much easier, it was found that translating the wiki markup at this level was too complex and fragile for this to work without a huge amount of special casing.

So, after the revision structure is derived from the filesystem, each page revision is retrieved by http requests to the running MoinMoin wiki. This is then reduced to just the page content (by picking out the content div from the html), and some light editing applied to simplify the HTML - specifically:-

Remove the anchor spans that MoinMoin adds - these add no visual or
readable content, but confuse the translator
Remove paragraph entries with CSS classes that start line - these
again appear to be for non-required purposes (likely for showing diffs
between revisions) - and they break the translator
Fix links that point within the wiki - if the target does not exist
then the text is left but the link removed.
Strips CSS classes off links - again these upset the translator
Translate any images that appear to be MoinMoin emoji characters (which
are rendered as images) into gollum emoji characters

This simplified HTML is then passed through the pandoc command:-

pandoc -f html -t gfm

And the resulting Github flavoured Markdown is taken as the new form.

This handles the vast majority of normal markup correctly, including lists and many types of tables. Some complicated markup or complex tables end up being passed through as HTML - which displays correctly but is less easy to parse and edit.

Attachments that are available in the wiki are also handled - they are put into a _attachments directory under a subdirectory named for the original page directory name. Links to attachments should be handled correctly.

Issues

The overall process is not particularly fast. But this should be something you only do once (or a few attempts) so raw speed is not needed.

Attachments are not versioned by MoinMon. This means any attachment that was deleted from MoinMoin is no longer available to put into the converted wiki. Any attachment that was updated a few times is only available in the last version (but will probably be inserted into the history at the point where it first appeared but with the latest content).

Installation

I have now made this available as a pypi package, in which case it can be installed by running

pip install moin2gitwiki

However to use it you will also need to install the pandoc and git packages as these commands are run during the conversion.

However it can be installed from the repo - it uses poetry to manage dependancies etc, so the best way to make use of this is to install poetry for your python version and then:-