Is there a self hosted web based note app similar to Obsidian or Joplin? I’ve tried Trilium and its ether above my pay grade in terms of knowledge, or I’ve set it up wrong. I’m mostly looking for something that has support for folders or a tree structure, markdown or simple text based and all accessible buy web browser.
I’ve gone from using Joplin, to Obsidian, I love both but am tired of waiting for sync before accessing my notes on different devices.
UPDATE: I ended up going with Joplin and hosting my own Joplin Server. It has clients for every device I use and it auto syncs as changes are made. Initial sync takes a while, but once that’s done it isn’t a problem.
+1 for bookstack
Outline, Trillium, and silverbullet are some alternatives I’ve seen recommended in threads along with Joplin and Obsidian.
I personally run a dokuwiki (with a markdown plugin) and that’s enough for me, call me old school if you must.
+1 to Trillium. I looked long and hard on this before settling on obsidian with the livesync plugin.
My personal gotcha with Trillium was that it required sqlite over something like postgres and that web based editors was less important to me.
So it’s not the same as a fully featured wiki application, but I host a docker instance of VS Code on my NAS pointed at my obsidian vault volume, then SSH tunnel into it when I’m on devices away from home. Foam (VS Code extension) helps add some missing Obsidian features (backlinks pane, syntax highlighting, some autocomplete, cmd-click to navigate wiki links).
I can share more implementation details if anyone’s interested; caveat is that unfortunately it doesn’t work on mobile.
Other options I looked into:
- GitHub - gollum/gollum: A simple, Git-powered wiki with a sweet API and local frontend.
- this requires you to use git in your vault, which didn’t work with my personal set-up, but might not bother you?
- Raneto - Markdown Knowledgebase for Node.js
- I couldn’t get this container to load anything in the browser; possibly less an issue with my vault content and more of an issue with my container set-up so maybe it’d work better for you.
- GitHub - Zavy86/WikiDocs: 📗 Just a databaseless markdown flat-file wiki engine…
- this version looks like it supports PUID and GUID assignment for volume read/write, if that matters. I didn’t try it though.
- Filestash — Self-hosted client for your data
- Taking a look in the docker installation instructions, I couldn’t find anywhere to put a local volume mounted to the docker container. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t actually interface with local files, so I didn’t test further.
- GitHub - gollum/gollum: A simple, Git-powered wiki with a sweet API and local frontend.
Maybe a bit different but I quite like WikiJS https://js.wiki/
I have it setup to use PostgreSQL and its built in text search engine and every page is also saved into a git repository.
I have quite a lot of notes written there over the years and im pretty happy with it.
Trillium
and qownnotes has a web client https://www.qownnotes.org/getting-started/web-app.html
notesnook is not well documented yet, but you can self host now https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook-sync-server
and turtl https://github.com/turtl/server#running-the-server
To add to other suggestions here, my current setup is just using folders with markdown or any other text files in a webIDE. In my case that’s Code-Server as I prefer a more centralized solution, and I get the benefits of keeping everything in version control.
I also have a Raneto instance pointing to my “Documents” folder which presents it all in a knowedge-base like format.
If you’re looking for something with mobile app integration this probably won’t work by itself; while the webapp for Code-Server works on mobile, it’s “cramped” at best.
I use code-server as well. For the mobile part i use syncthing to sync all the files to my mobile, then edit locally with Markor markdown android app.
What do you mean by version control, is this something you manage with code-server, or do you have a git repo running?
For the mobile part …
I do something similar with FolderSync and SftpGo and have Drafting (vague name) to create and edit notes.
As for version control I just have all of the documents in a git repository on my Code-Server instance which I regularly commit and sync with a local Gitea deployment; nothing special. Though it could be possible to use something like Mgit with a Tasker automation in lieu of a data sync with foldersync/syncthing, I just haven’t looked into it in earnest.
That’s interesting, it never crossed my mind that I could run git on my phone. But I think I want to look for a way to auto commit every day on my code-server instance, not sure if that’s possible at all. Drafting app looks nice, I’ll have a try
That should be pretty simple to do with cron and a shell script. Whether you can easily do that within the container depends on who packaged it though.
Maybe Nextcloud Collectives? If you already use Nextcloud it is simple to install, but if you don’t, you need all Nextcloud instance. I use Hedgedoc but this app does not provide folders and tree structure (but has tags)
I use Tiddlywiki. I’ve been liking it so far.
If you’re already self hosting some sort of git server, you could give gitjournal a shot: gitjournal
After nothing ever working right, this has worked very well for me.
Might not 100% fit, but https://github.com/usememos/memos
