pinotes

Self-hosted notes solution. Primarily targeting Raspberry PI but should work on any other system.

Breaking change
5th Sept 21: The application now uses sqlite instead of plain markdown files. If you had like to migrate your existing notes to sqlite database you can use the command line -migrate option. All the markdown files in current directory will be migrated to sqlite database.

Setup

Configure Firewall

We want to make sure that the notes are served within LAN and not on the Internet.

# on raspbian/ubuntu
 sudo ufw default deny incoming       # disables all incoming connections
 sudo ufw allow from 192.168.0.0/16   # allows connections within local LAN

Install

The setup below is for raspbian. You may have to modify some steps as per your distribution.

1. Clone the repository to your desktop git clone https://github.com/quaintdev/pinotes.git

2. Create a systemd service file as below and move it to /etc/systemd/system/pinotes.service on your Raspberry pi.

   [Unit]
   Description=A self hosted notes service
   After=network.target
   
   [Service]
   User=pi
   WorkingDirectory=/home/user/pinotes
   LimitNOFILE=4096
   ExecStart=/home/user/pinotes/pinotes.bin
   Restart=always
   RestartSec=10
   StartLimitIntervalSec=0
   
   [Install]
   WantedBy=multi-user.target

3. Create a deployment script as below. You will have to modify it for your env and Pi version. This is for Raspberry Pi 2 B.

   cd build
   export CGO_ENABLED=1
   export CC=arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc
   GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm GOARM=7 go build github.com/quaintdev/pinotes/cmd/
   mv cmd pinotes.bin
   scp pinotes.bin user@piaddress:/home/user/pinotes/
   ssh user@piaddress <<'ENDSSH'
   cd ~/user/pinotes
   sudo systemctl stop pinotes
   rm pinotes.bin
   sudo systemctl start pinotes
   ENDSSH

4. Create a config file as per your requirement. You can use config.json in this repository.

5. Verify your setup by visiting http://piaddress:8008/. You will see an empty list of topics [] if this is your first time.

Browser Config

1. Create a search engine in your browser using url http://piaddress:8008/add?q=%s
2. Assign a keyword such as pi. You should now be able to add notes like below

   pi todo - buy groceries
   pi readlater - http://wikipedia.com/

3. All your notes will be saved in 'defaultTopic' defined in config.json
4. You can view any topic using http://piaddress:8008/topic/topicname