Configuring tzk

Basic setup

  1. Change into a directory you’d like to use as your Zettelkasten repository. The directory should be empty, so you’ll probably want to create a new one, e.g.:

    $ mkdir my_zettelkasten
    $ cd my_zettelkasten
    
  2. Run tzk init. This will create a tzk configuration file, install TiddlyWiki to this folder, and set up a Git repository.

  3. When init has completed successfully, open the tzk_config.py in your favorite text editor. Read the comments and make any changes you would like. See the Builders section of this documentation for more information about builders – but you’ll most likely want to get started with your wiki now and worry about builds once you actually have some content to build!

  4. Run tzk listen and confirm that you can access your wiki.

Committing

Many people find that carefully designing atomic Git commits when editing a TiddlyWiki is difficult and not all that useful, so the tzk commit command is made available to quickly stage, commit, and (if you wish) push all changes in the repository in one go.

If you want to push your changes to some remote location, such as a GitHub repository, add a new Git remote (e.g., git remote add origin https://github.com/you/YourRepository) and set the commit_remote option in your tzk config to the remote name (here, origin). You can selectively skip pushing for a particular commit with the --local switch to tzk commit.

Note

If you want to push a wiki that contains only some of your content to GitHub in a form that others can browse, don’t try to set it up here – use a publish_wiki_to_github() builder at the end of the public build product. See Builders for more information.

Environment

If you’d like to be able to run tzk from any directory, rather than having to change into the directory of your tzk repository, set the TZK_DIRECTORY environment variable on your system to its full path. If the current directory contains a tzk_config.py file, the current directory will still be preferred to the TZK_DIRECTORY directory.

Note

TZK_DIRECTORY is not honored when calling tzk init. Otherwise tzk would prioritize the TZK_DIRECTORY over the current directory since the current directory doesn’t contain a config file yet, and it would be impossible to initialize a second tzk repository.