Getting Started
You’ve ordered a managed BookStack at server.camp — congratulations! BookStack is a simple, clean knowledge base for your business. Processes, guides, onboarding documents, and internal know-how in one central place — structured, searchable, and accessible to your whole team. This guide is for freelancers, nonprofits, and small to medium-sized businesses that want to stop hiding knowledge in people’s heads, emails, and folders.
In SMBs, company knowledge often lives in the heads of individual employees: How do we create a quote? Who’s the contact at supplier X? How does the accounting software work? When that person is sick or leaves the company, the knowledge is gone.
BookStack makes internal knowledge explicit, searchable, and accessible to new team members — without anyone having to pass everything on in person. BookStack’s special strength is its clear, built-in structure. Instead of an unmanageable sprawl of pages, BookStack guides you toward a tidy order of shelves, books, chapters, and pages.
Common use cases:
- Onboarding documents for new hires — everything important at a glance
- Process documentation — “How do we issue an invoice?”, “How does the holiday request process work?”
- IT guides — step-by-step instructions for common technical tasks
- Product knowledge — specifications, manuals, FAQs for sales
- Public help center — an FAQ or help center for your customers
- Security policies — GDPR documentation, IT security policies, emergency plans
BookStack organises content in a clear, four-level hierarchy. This very order is what makes BookStack so easy to navigate:
- Pages — the actual content, e.g. a guide or a process
- Chapters — optional grouping of pages within a book
- Books — collect related pages and chapters around one topic
- Shelves — the top level, grouping multiple books together
📚 Shelf: Onboarding
📕 Book: Getting Started for New Hires
📑 Chapter: Before Day One
📄 Page: What to bring
📑 Chapter: Your First Day
📄 Page: IT equipment & access
📄 Page: Key tools at a glance
Chapters are optionalNot every book needs chapters. For short books you can place pages directly in the book. Chapters only pay off once a book has many pages and you want to group them by topic.
After ordering, you’ll receive an email from us with the link to your BookStack instance and your login credentials.
- The first account is automatically the administrator and can manage everything.
- Your email address is set as the login email, and the display name is initially “Admin”.
- You can reach the admin area any time via the profile icon in the top right → “Settings”.
Adjust your profile and nameFirst, change the display name from “Admin” to your real name in your profile. That way your colleagues can later see who created or edited which page.
BookStack can be tailored to your business. Under Settings → Customization you can configure, among other things:
- Application name — the name of your knowledge base
- Logo — ideally a PNG with a transparent background
- Primary colour — to match your corporate design
- Default dark mode — whether new users start in light or dark mode
- Custom header and footer — e.g. for links or legal notices
A proven layout to start with:
📚 General
📕 Welcome & organisation
📕 Contacts & emergency numbers
📚 Onboarding
📕 Getting started for new hires
📕 Tools & access
📚 Processes
📕 Accounting (invoicing, receipt capture)
📕 HR (holiday requests, sick leave)
📕 Sales (quote creation, CRM workflow)
📚 IT & Tech
📕 Guides (VPN, password manager, printers)
📚 Customers
📕 Public help center / FAQ
Tip on planning your structureBefore you set things up, think about which main areas your wiki should have. A structure with a few clearly named shelves is easier to maintain than many small ones. Start simple and expand as needed.
- First create a shelf (e.g. “Onboarding”)
- Inside the shelf, create a book (e.g. “Getting Started for New Hires”)
- In the book, click “New Page”
- Give it a meaningful title
- Write your content in the editor and save the page
BookStack gives you two ways to write content:
| Editor | For whom | Advantages |
|---|---|---|
| WYSIWYG | All staff, no Markdown knowledge needed | Comfortable, familiar like a text editor |
| Markdown | Developers, technical users | Fast, consistent formatting |
Both editors also offer handy features:
- draw.io diagrams — a full diagram editor is built right in
- Images and attachments — embed directly in pages or attach as files
- Page templates — save recurring structures as a template and reuse them
Recommendation for mixed teamsSettle on one editing method for your team — ideally the WYSIWYG editor. If everyone uses a different editor, inconsistencies in page formatting creep in easily. The WYSIWYG editor is the most accessible entry point for most non-developers.
The more content you collect, the more important it becomes to find it again. BookStack helps with:
- Full-text search — searches all content in real time
- Tags — label pages with keywords and filter by them
- Cross-linking — connect pages to each other for more context
- Favourites — mark important pages for quick access
Good titles are half the battleUse meaningful page titles. A page called “Invoicing: step-by-step guide” is easier to find than “accounting-final-v2”.
BookStack is a collaborative tool:
- Revisions — every change to a page is saved; you can view and restore earlier versions any time
- Comments — discussions and questions right below a page
This keeps it transparent who changed what and when — and nothing gets lost.
BookStack can be controlled very granularly. You decide exactly who may see and edit which content.
Create users: Under Settings → Users you create new accounts and assign roles.
Manage roles: Under Settings → Roles you define roles with fine-grained permissions (e.g. read only, create pages, manage).
Permissions per content: In addition, you can set individual permissions at every level — shelf, book, chapter, or page. For example, accounting sees its accounting book in full, while other teams see only the general content.
Registration is disabled by defaultBy default, new users can’t register themselves — you create accounts deliberately. Via your instance settings in the dashboard, you can enable open registration at any time, optionally with email confirmation and a restriction to specific email domains.
If you already use a central login in your company, you can connect it to BookStack. Supported are:
- OpenID Connect (OIDC) and SAML 2.0
- Social logins: Google, GitHub, GitLab, Microsoft/Azure, and Okta
With OIDC and SAML 2.0, groups from your identity provider can be mapped automatically to BookStack roles. Important: the corresponding roles must already exist in BookStack beforehand.
You can set up SSO yourself via your instance settings in the dashboard. If you have any questions, simply reach out to support. If you don’t have an identity provider yet, we recommend Authentik, also available as a managed service at server.camp.
The BookStack interface is set to German by default. You can change the language any time — both per user (in your own profile) and system-wide as the default for everyone.
You’re never locked into BookStack: you can export individual pages and entire books at any time — no extra tools needed:
- PDF — ideal for sending or printing
- HTML — for reuse on the web
- Markdown — for moving into other systems
- Plain text — for maximum compatibility
- ZIP — a portable, complete package including images and attachments that can also be imported back into another BookStack instance
Search engine indexing is disabled by default — sensible for internal wikis that shouldn’t show up on Google. If you want to run a public help center that can be found via search engines, we’re happy to enable indexing for you. Just contact support.
If you need help setting up your structure, permissions, or SSO connection, you can reach us any time at support@server.camp. We’re happy to help!
You’ll also find a detailed reference for all features in the official BookStack documentation. For frequently asked questions, see our BookStack product page.