notes

A simple note-taking web app.

Note

This is a hobby project, don't expect stability, documentation, security fixes, etc.

Tech stack

Rails 8 with Hotwire + Stimulus, Tailwind, Importmaps, and SQLite.

Getting started

# clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/jethrodaniel/notes
cd notes

# setup the app
bundle
bin/setup

# run it locally
bin/dev

Then visit http://localhost:3000 in your browser.

You can sign in with the default credentials (see db/seeds.rb for details):

email: admin@app.test
password: password

Testing

bin/ci

You may also need to install dependencies for system tests:

snap install chromium # e.g, on ubuntu 24.04

Deployment

The app is setup to deploy to a single server using Kamal and Bitwarden Secret Manager.

Container registry

Kamal currently requires a container registry.

Most likely, you'll want your images to be private - an easy way set this up is to create a private Gitlab repository, and use the free container registry service that provides.

Rails credentials

Before deploying, you need to fill in the required credentials:

bin/rails credentials:edit -e production

secret_key_base: your-secret-key-base

kamal:
  service: notes-production
  image: username/notes
  proxy_host: your.deploy.url
  registry_server: registry.example.com
  registry_username: username
  retain_containers: 2
  server: 192.123.456.789
  ssh_user: username
  volume_storage: notes_production_storage:/rails/storage

smtp:
  user_name: username
  password: password
  address: your.smtp.address
  host: your.smtp.host
  port: 123
  authentication: TODO
  host: your.deploylurl
  from: user@your.deploy.url

Setting up staging is similar, just change the hosts/volumes/etc to the staging versions.

bin/rails credentials:edit -e staging

kamal:
  service: notes-staging
  proxy_host: staging.your.deploy.url
  volume_storage: notes_staging_storage:/rails/storage
  # ...

Setup bitwarden

Then create a bitwarden account, and setup a secrets manager project for each environment with the following keys:

KAMAL_REGISTRY_PASSWORD
RAILS_MASTER_KEY

Projects should be named notes-production, notes-staging, etc (match RAILS_ENV).

Download and setup the secrets manager: https://bitwarden.com/help/secrets-manager-cli/

Then add your bitwarden info to .env:

cp -v .env.example .env

# .env
export BWS_ACCESS_TOKEN="your token goes here"
export BWS_SERVER_URL=https://vault.bitwarden.com

Sanity check if it works like so:

RAILS_ENV=production bin/dotenv bin/kamal secrets print

NOTE: the above setup requires every instance of kamal be called with RAILS_ENV and bin/dotenv bin/kamal.

Server setup

Vendor our own kamal-proxy:

bin/dotenv bin/update_kamal_proxy

Tell our server to use that image:

bin/tell_kamal_to_use_our_proxy_image

Deploy

RAILS_ENV=staging bin/dotenv bin/kamal deploy
RAILS_ENV=production bin/dotenv bin/kamal deploy

One time setup needed afterwards:

# create databases, seed staging
RAILS_ENV=staging bin/dotenv bin/kamal app exec 'bin/rails db:setup'
RAILS_ENV=production bin/dotenv bin/kamal app exec 'bin/rails db:setup'

# production: create your user (see db/seeds.rb)
# staging: update your weak db/seed user's password
#
RAILS_ENV=staging bin/dotenv bin/kamal console
RAILS_ENV=production bin/dotenv bin/kamal console

Logo

To generate the favicon.ico:

inkscape app/assets/images/icon.svg --export-width=256 --export-filename=tmp.png
convert tmp.png -define icon:auto-resize=256,64,48,32,16 app/assets/images/favicon.ico
rm tmp.png

I18n

Users can change their language in-app to either English or Spanish.

Non-logged in pages (e.g, sign-in) aren't translated yet.

Non-english translations were performed (crudely) using AI translate.

Spanish datetime.distance_in_words translations are from svenfuchs/rails-i18n (MIT).

License

Notes is released under the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3 (AGPLv3) or any later version.

Copyright 2025 Mark Delk. All rights reserved.

Contributing

While the code is released under the AGPL, I'd still like to be able to release it under something like the MIT license eventually.

To that end, contributions aren't accepted (yet).