I’ve started writing some recipes with Cooklang. And so I thought about adding the Dokuwiki Cooklang plugin to this notebook. But I’ve been struggling to get it to work.

• I needed to figure out how to install cook, the commandline software that parses cooklang recipes. I figured out that OVH might permit me to put this in the cgi-bin subfolder on my shared hosting.
• After that, I had to figure out how to configure the Dokuwiki to actually find it. It’s all about finding the right path.
• But even after that the plugin would still return an error and never display properly a recipe.
• Turns out at OVH compiles its PHP with --enable-sigchild which makes proc_close, a function that the plugin calls to close the connection with cook always return undefined or an error. So the plugin never moves to displaying the recipe.
• After chatting with Gemini for a while to debug this PHP issue and look for alternative. Gemini suggested to create a third output pipeline just to catch the return of the command. That seemed to have done the trick. The forked and working code is here https://github.com/xuv/dokuwiki-plugin-cooklang/tree/fix_only_errors Maybe the original author will accept the pull request.

The plugin will only work with simple recipes. It does not work with meta-data, titles for sections, notes or recipe reference

To update the cookcli on this server, find the release that’s named: cook-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz, unpack it and move it to cgi-bin folder

• Cooklang Dokuwiki plugin needs to be updated to render the latest version of the specification. Until then, it’s probably only partially usable and with quite simple recipes.