LocalCache

Although Contentsgarten uses GitHub as the sole source of truth for the wiki contents, querying data directly from GitHub without using a local database has a few major drawbacks.

• GitHub API is slow to respond and has rate limiting. From Thailand, requesting the required configuration and data from GitHub to build a page takes about 2 seconds. Using a cache can potentially solve this problem.

• We want to be able to query the data across multiple pages without knowing which page it belongs to in order to ask questions such as “what links here?”.

Architecture

Contentsgarten will not fetch file contents from GitHub directly. Instead, it will consult from the local cache database. If the data is not in the local database, we fetch the data from GitHub and load it into the local database.

The local cache database is designed in a way such that the database can be dropped and all the data inside can be regenerated from the contents in GitHub (keeping it as the sole source of truth).