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TREK/wiki/In-App-Help.md

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In-App Help

Read the whole TREK wiki from inside TREK, without leaving the app or opening GitHub.

In-App Help

Where to find it

Click your avatar in the top-right navbar and choose Help, or go to /help directly. Individual pages live at /help/{slug} — for example /help/Packing-Lists.

The page is titled Help & Docs. You must be signed in to reach the route.

The Help Center (the ? in the navbar) links here too: its In the docs links and Open in Help & Docs open the matching page of this wiki at /help/{slug}.

The docs ship with your install

Since v3.4.0 the wiki is bundled into the TREK image and served from disk (commit 6c87bf2f). That means:

  • The help you read always matches the version you are running. A v3.4 install shows v3.4 docs, not whatever main says.
  • Help works with no outbound network access at all.
  • Screenshots and other images are served by TREK, not fetched from GitHub — your browser never talks to github.com for help content.

The GitHub fallback

If the bundled wiki/ directory cannot be found — an unusual layout, or an image built without it — TREK logs a warning and falls back to fetching the public GitHub wiki over the network instead, caching each page and image for an hour and serving a stale copy rather than failing outright. Help degrades instead of disappearing, but the content then tracks the latest release rather than your version.

TREK probes for _Sidebar.md specifically, not just the directory, so a half-copied wiki/ folder falls back rather than serving an empty table of contents.

TREK_WIKI_DIR

The bundled directory is found automatically. TREK_WIKI_DIR overrides where TREK looks — an escape hatch for unusual layouts, not something a normal install needs to set. See Environment-Variables.

The sidebar

The left sidebar mirrors this wiki's own table of contents, parsed straight out of _Sidebar.md: the same sections, in the same order, with the same page titles. On screens narrower than desktop the sidebar collapses behind a Contents button that opens it as a drawer.

The page you are reading is highlighted with a chevron.

The Search docs… box at the top of the sidebar filters the navigation as you type. It matches page titles only — it does not search inside page text. Sections with no matching page disappear; when nothing matches you get No matching pages.

To search page contents, use the wiki on GitHub or your browser's in-page find.

Rendering

Pages render with TREK's own styling: headings, tables, code blocks, blockquotes, and images. A few things are handled specially so the same Markdown works both here and on GitHub:

  • Wiki links in either GitHub spelling — [[Title|Slug]] and the bare relative [Currencies](Currencies) — become in-app links that navigate without a page reload.
  • Relative image paths are rewritten to TREK's own asset endpoint.
  • Heading anchors use GitHub's slug scheme, so a ](#some-heading) link inside a page lands in the right place.
  • HTML comments (such as <!-- TODO: screenshot --> placeholders) are stripped rather than shown.

External links open in a new tab.

If a page cannot be loaded you get Couldn't load this page — The help content is fetched from the TREK wiki. Check your connection and try again.

Permissions

No permission gates the help browser; any signed-in user sees the same pages. The underlying /api/help endpoints are unauthenticated, because the content is public documentation — that is also what lets image tags load without sending credentials.

See also