Markdown Notebook

markdown-notebook is a self-hosted web application to organize and write your notes in Markdown. It allows you to create multiple users whose notes are organized in files and nested in directories as they like.

The backend stores all notes in a SQLite database file.

Docker deployment

The simplest way to deploy this is by using the prebuild docker images on Docker Hub for the backend, webapp and load-balancer.

First make sure you have Docker and docker-compose installed.

Create a .env file derived from .env.template in an empty directory and fill in a random jwt secret and the path to the directory where the database file should be stored on the host. It should look like this:

JWT_SECRET=<some random secret>
PORT=8430
DATABASE_STORAGE_DIR=/var/lib/markdown-notebook

Then copy docker-compose.yml from this repository into the same directory.

Now the project can be run using docker-compose. All commands are executed in the directory that contains a valid .env and the docker-compose.yml file:

# Start webapp, backend and load balancer and show the aggregated output of all
# services.
$ docker-compose up

# Start webapp, backend and load balancer in the background.
$ docker-compose up -d

# Stop all services.
$ docker-compose stop

# Stop and remove services.
$ docker-compose down

Unless you modify the compose file the services will be restarted in case they crash or on reboot as long as they are not stopped manually.

To update to the latest version of all services, run the following commands:

$ docker-compose stop
$ docker-compose pull
$ docker-compose up -d

Creating and deleting a user as well as changing the password is possible using the binaries bundled with the backend service.

# Create a user:
$ docker-compose run backend create_user

# Change the password of a user:
$ docker-compose run backend change_password

# Delete a user:
$ docker-compose run backend delete_user

Docker deployment from source

If you wish to deploy from source clone this repository, create a .env file based on .env.template as described above and pass the docker-compose.build.yml compose file to docker-compose using the -f option.

Additional to the commands described above this might be helpful:

# Rebuild the images after changes to the source of one or more services.
$ app_version=`git rev-parse --short HEAD` docker-compose -f docker-compose.build.yml build

Install build tools and dependencies

Frontend

The following tools are required:

• Node.js 12 with NPM
• Yarn
  • Install with npm install -g yarn
• TypeScript
  • Install with npm install -g typescript

To install all dependencies, run:

$ cd packages/webapp
$ yarn install

Backend

For development rust, cargo as well as the diesel-cli must be installed.

• Install rust and cargo
• Install the diesel-cli with

$ cargo install diesel_cli --no-default-features --features sqlite

If this fails with errors like

note: ld: library not found for -lmysqlclient
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)

it means you are missing the required client libraries. The exact details on installing them can currently be found in https://github.com/diesel-rs/diesel/blob/master/guide_drafts/backend_installation.md.

For example on Debian based linux distributions run

$ sudo apt install libsqlite3-dev

for the client library for sqlite.