Six Years of BookStack

Dan Brown posted on the 13th of July 2021

Well there goes another year, A year of worldwide lock-downs and uncertainty but BookStack development has pushed on and now we’re at 6 years since the original commit on the 12th of July 2015. To mark the milestone we’ll look at the figures, go into some upcoming plans and distribute some thanks.

An Upcoming Experimental Change of Pace

At the end of September I’ll be leaving my current job, where I’ve been working for the last 7 years. The details of this can be found on my personal blog here but to summarise: From October my current plan is to focus on BookStack for the proceeding 6 months before looking for a new role. I don’t have any specific targets or goals for this period but my current idea is to just accelerate along the current path of development to see where we end up afterwards. This should be an exciting time and I’m looking forward to being able to put some real focus on the project for a while.

Shoutout to Reddit

I want to take this post as an opportunity to shout out to the technical community on Reddit, and the /r/selfhosted subreddit in particular. The response to the “5 years of BookStack” post last year was incredibly kind and there have been continued positive & constructive comments from that community since my original posting of the project there in 2016.

I use F5bot to keep tabs of BookStack mentions on Reddit and I see almost daily mentions across the /r/selfhosted, /r/homelab and /r/sysadmin subreddits, most of which are recommendations which warms my heart every time and adds some mental fuel to the project.

BookStack, In Numbers, A Year Later

For the “Five years of BookStack” post I decided to list out a bunch of metrics related to the project. I thought it’d be fun to do the same for 6 years, but show the relative increases/decreases.

At the time of writing (13th July):

GitHub Figures

6,854 GitHub stars +1,804
1043 forks on GitHub +226
2,844 GitHub issues and PRs opened +642
1,872 GitHub issues closed (+576), 450 open (-58)
118 releases published +28
1,558 (+236) git clones in the last 14 days, 594 (+34) unique

Code Repository Stats

2,658 commits +458
136 direct git contributors +9

Website Analytics

Main bookstackapp.com site only, Averaged over last 90 days:

754 unique users per day +323
- (Analytics system change may distort this)
1,982 page views per day +417
Operating system breakdown:
- 52% Windows +3%
- 19% Mac -1%
- 10% Android -2%
- 10% Linux
- 7% iOS

Our full website analytics since the start of the year can be found here.

CrowdIn (Project Translations) Numbers

34 languages +8
4764 words to translate +521
122 project members +58

Thoughts on the Numbers

We’ve had a nice continued stable growth of the project over the last year which is positive and keeps things manageable. Last year I was particularly suprised by the discord membership count and now I’m surprised again by the relative change in the last year, Over 1.5k people are now part of that chat which I think is still darn surprising for a documentation platform. While on the topic of the discord chat, I’ve noticed over the last year some wonderful people have been consistently supporting others in the chat. Shout-out to Corporat, Khroners, Morten (Mynster) and lesmyrmidons for your consistent help, it means a lot (Sorry if I’ve missed anyone else out).

Subscribe to Updates

There are two lists you can sign-up to for updates, A general news & updates list, sent on a weekly basis, and a security alerts list that's sent when new security updates are available.

News and Updates | Security Alerts