wordbin

One place to drop English words you don't know yet.

I encounter unknown words everywhere — subtitles, browser tabs, podcasts, books. Every tool I tried solved one source but not the others. I ended up with words scattered across a phone app, a browser extension, and a notebook that I never actually reviewed.

Wordbin is a self-hosted daemon that gives me a single endpoint to send words from anywhere. A browser extension for the web, a CLI for the terminal, whatever else later. Everything lands in one SQLite file.

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What it is

• wordbin-server — Axum daemon, exposes a REST API, stores words in SQLite; ships an admin CLI for token issuance
• wordbin-extension — Browser extension (Leptos/WASM) to capture words while browsing
• wordbin-types — Shared types between server and clients

What it is not

• A flashcard app (yet)
• A SaaS
• Stable

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Architecture

┌──────────────┐                           ┌──────────────┐
│  admin CLI   │   token issue (offline)   │              │
│ (server bin) │ ────────────────────────▶ │              │
└──────────────┘                           │              │
                                           │   Server     │
┌──────────────┐  POST /word/add           │   (Axum)     │ ──▶ SQLite
│  Extension   │  Authorization: Bearer    │              │
│ (Leptos/WASM)│ ────────────────────────▶ │              │
└──────────────┘                           └──────────────┘
        ▲                                         ▲
        └──── shared types: wordbin-types ────────┘

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Features

• Capture words from any browser tab — source auto-fills from hostname
• Three pages — quick capture, full word list, settings
• 4 UI languages — en / ru / de / fr
• OpenAPI docs auto-generated, Swagger UI at /swagger-ui
• Single binary, SQLite as the only runtime dependency

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Stack

• Server — Rust, Axum, SQLite via sqlx
• Extension — Rust, Leptos, WASM
• Config — TOML via figment
• Docs — Swagger UI via utoipa

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Running the server

From source

git clone https://github.com/Vancoola/wordbin
cd wordbin

# .env at workspace root
echo 'DATABASE_URL=sqlite:words.db' > .env

cargo run -p wordbin-server

Run all cargo and sqlx commands from the workspace root — the .env is resolved relative to the current working directory.

Migrations

Migrations live in server/migrations/. The runtime applies them on startup, so a fresh cargo run is enough for normal use. For ad-hoc operations a root-level Makefile wraps sqlx-cli:

make migrate                        # apply pending migrations
make migrate-add name=add_tokens    # create a new migration
make db-reset                       # wipe words.db and re-apply

sqlx-cli is a separate install: cargo install sqlx-cli --no-default-features --features sqlite.

Docker

Build context is the workspace root, not server/ — the sibling wordbin-types crate is needed:

git clone https://github.com/Vancoola/wordbin
cd wordbin
docker build -f server/Dockerfile -t wordbin-server .

# Pre-create the SQLite file — without this, Docker creates a directory at the
# bind path and SQLite fails with "unable to open database file".
touch words.db

docker run --rm -p 3000:3000 \
  -v "$PWD/words.db:/app/server/words.db" \
  wordbin-server

words.db lives in the current directory and survives container restarts.

Config

Read from server/App.toml and baked into the image at build time — change the port or log level before docker build.

[server]
port = 3000
host = "0.0.0.0"
tracing_level = "INFO"

Swagger UI: http://localhost:3000/swagger-ui.

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Authentication

All /word endpoints require a JWT in the Authorization: Bearer <token> header. Tokens are issued by the server binary's admin subcommand and stored hashed in SQLite.

Two roles:

• admin — full access, intended for CLI / admin tools
• user — data access only, intended for the browser extension and other clients

Issuing a token

# never expires
cargo run -p wordbin-server -- token issue admin --name "my-laptop"

# expires in 30 days
cargo run -p wordbin-server -- token issue user --name "chrome-extension" --ttl-days 30

The plaintext token is printed once on stdout — save it, it's not recoverable later (only the hash is stored).

In Docker:

docker run --rm -v "$PWD/words.db:/app/server/words.db" \
  wordbin-server token issue user --name "chrome-extension"

Building the extension

Use Makefile:

cd wordbin-extension
make build

Or:

cd wordbin-extension
wasm-pack build --target web --out-dir dist/pkg --release
cp manifest.json index.html popup.css bootstrap.js dist/ && cp -r icons dist/

Then load wordbin-extension/dist/ into Chrome:

1. Open chrome://extensions
2. Toggle Developer mode (top right)
3. Click Load unpacked, select the dist/ directory

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Roadmap

• Capture endpoint + extension popup
• Settings page with i18n
• Words list view
• Spaced-repetition review flow (table already in schema)
• Auth — JWT (admin / user roles)
• Admin CLI — token issuance
• Telegram client (bot)
• CLI client
• Docker image
• Tauri client

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Status

Active development since May 2026. Schema will change. Built for myself — issues and PRs welcome, no guarantees.