Part 2: Wikipedia managed with Co-op cloud on LoRes Mesh

Docker swarm setup

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +1000

We’re just about ready to start installing apps using Co-op Cloud. Co-op Cloud apps are a set of Docker containers. We’ll sometimes work with docker directly, so let’s go over the concepts involved.

There’s some background info below, but if you’re already familiar with Docker and Docker Swarm, you can skip ahead to Installing Docker.

Abra server config, stored in git

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +1000

The commands on this page are all on our dev computer.

Creating server config

We already made our Raspberry Pi available on the internet via a domain name. That public domain name is how we’re going to be referring to it with abra.

Let’s start by creating the server config:

abra server add YOUR_SERVER_DOMAIN

(replace YOUR_SERVER_DOMAIN with the correct domain for your server, eg makerspace.nodes.merri-bek.tech)

If that worked, you should see it in the list of servers that abra is now managing by running:

The Traefik web proxy

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +1000

We’re going to have multiple apps on our Raspberry Pi, so we need a way of directing traffic to the correct one. Co-op Cloud has a standard approach to this using a web proxy called Traefik.

Despite Traefik’s special role in routing requests to other apps, it is itself just installed as a Co-op Cloud app, managed by abra.

Creating the app

Let’s add the new app using:

abra app new traefik

It will ask you to select which server you’re deploying to, unless this is your only server. It will also ask you to specify a domain for the app, and you can press ENTER for the default.

Preparing a flash drive full of "zim" files

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +1000

If we’re going to store a local copy of Wikipedia, we’re going to need some storage for it.

Wikipedia is over 100GB, for just the English version. The MicroSD Card that you created for the Raspberry Pi is likely not big enough to store it, an in fact we’re not generally going to use that SD card for storing application data for a number of reasons. It’s mostly just for the operating system.

Accessing the flash drive on with the Pi

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +1000

When you put flash drive we just prepared in your dev computer, it probably pops up ready to read in your file manager. The Raspberry Pi won’t do that automatically, so we need to set that up.

Plugging it in

Let’s start by plugging the flash drive into one of the USB ports on the Pi. On a Raspberry Pi 5, only two blue USB (type A) ports support the faster USB-3. Providing you have a modern flash drive that supports it, you want to put it in one of those.

The Kiwix wikipedia server

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +1000

Kiwix is a great project to make a number of important reference websites, including Wikipedia, readable offline.

It looks a lot like installing any app with abra, so let’s go through steps very similar to the ones we just followed with traefik:

Creating the app

Let’s add the new app using:

abra app new kiwix

Configuring the app

We do have something to configure here, so let’s run:

abra app config traefik.YOUR_SERVER_DOMAIN

There’s a line in the config that will look like this: