tl;dr: I stumbled over Kanka, fell in love with it, and then, thanks to the sunk cost fallacy, created an actually easy self‑hostable version: Kanka-CE. To get started, just follow this installation guide.
So here is the long story....
Like many people here, I’ve been hunting for a self‑hostable alternative to World Anvil for ages. During my latest round of “surely something must exist by now”, I stumbled across Kanka and immediately fell in love.
But… in its original form, Kanka is not easy to self‑host. So I started poking at it, hit a few obstacles (proprietary icons… why), and instead of giving up like a sane person, I just kept going until it worked, as is custom here in r/SelfHosting.
Introducing: Kanka Community Edition (Kanka‑CE)
The goal is a community‑maintained, reproducible, easy‑to‑self‑host version of Kanka, without the non‑free assets, and without the “oh cool, this feature is premium” surprises.
Why should you care?
Because there is still no real self‑hostable alternative to World Anvil, and Kanka’s codebase is genuinely good, it just wasn’t packaged for self‑hosting.
Now, with Kanka‑CE, it is.
What works so far:
- Semi‑automated installation
- No proprietary assets
- Premium features enabled
- Invite‑only registration
- A setup process that doesn’t require ~5l coffe and sacrificing a weekend to debugging rituals
So if you are also looking for a tool to manage your DnD world, you can find the installation guide here:
https://github.com/kinnewig/kanka-community-edition/wiki/Installation
If you want to help, just take a look at the GitHub repository:
https://github.com/kinnewig/kanka-community-edition