notebase

Notebase is my yet another iteration on the "Everything App". This time I am going for my markdown notes.

There are several key points, why I develop this project:

• I need a mobile-friendly web interface for my notes (Obsidian Web is not good enough, and Obsidian App is too heavy)
• I want a well-established query language, like SQL to work with my notes (Dataview and Datacore are still great, but see previous point)
• I want to replace multiple tools I use for everyday life and I always thought they fit nicely into my markdown notes, just need a better interface (like todo lists, finance goals, tv show tracker, habit tracker, etc.)

I document some of my decisions regarding this project in docs/adrs.

Usage

Notebase is intented to run as a Docker container. You can try it out together with the example data like this:

docker build -t notebase:latest .
docker run -it -p 8080:8080 notesbase

You can further customize the container by setting environment variables:

docker run -it \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -e SUPERUSER_EMAIL=admin@example.com \
  -e SUPERUSER_PASSWORD=supersecret \
  -e NOTES_ROOT=/tmp/notes \
  -v $PWD/data:/tmp/example/notes \
  notesbase \
  serve --http=0.0.0.0:8080 --dev

• make sure to add .notebase.yml to your root. You can check out my current config in /examples/biozz_notebase_config.yml
• SUPERUSER_EMAIL and SUPERUSER_PASSWORD are optional, but if you don't set them, you will be prompted to create a superuser account
• --dev is also optional, you can set it if want to see query and access logs

After creating it, go to http://localhost:8080.

Development

You are going to need Go (whichever version is provided in go.mod) and Node/pnpm.

There is an example/ directory with a bunch of notes and a config file.

NOTES_ROOT=./example/notes go run . serve

If you feel ambitious after thoroughly inspecting the source code, you can do NOTES_ROOT=/abs/path/to/your/vault go run . serve and try it on the real data. :)

And if you do, don't forget to add .notebase.yml to your root. You can check out my current config in /examples/biozz_notebase_config.yml.

serve command also starts a background sync job. serve will created pb_data directory, which should not be checked into the VCS and is meant to be disposable. That means taht if there is any error or migration conflict you delete pb_data and run the server again.

Follow PocketBase instructions to create an account.

Then you can run frontend separately (assuming you installed dependencies):

pnpm dev

Contributing

I might be interested in some contributions, but because it is an experimental project, I would prefer discussions and maybe code-reviews of the non-optimal or non-conventional parts of the codebase.