📝 Noteshare.space

Noteshare.space is a service for sharing encrypted Markdown notes from Obsidian. Notes are end-to-end-encrypted and are only stored temporarily.

I created this service largely for my own use, as I was tired of relying on third-party services to quickly share some Markdown notes I wrote in Obsidian. Because I believe that others may find this useful, I chose to make it available as a public service.

Local development

Each subproject (plugin, server, and webapp) is its own npm package with its own configuration and build tooling:

| (root)
|-- package.json
|-- docker-compose.yml
|-- plugin/        // (Obsidian plugin, as submodule at mcndt/obsidian-note-sharing)
	|-- package.json
	|-- Dockerfile
|-- server/        // (Express + Prisma + SQLite)
	|-- package.json
	|-- Dockerfile
	|-- prisma/
		|--- Dockerfile
|-- webapp/        // (SvelteKit web application)
	|-- package.json
	|-- Dockerfile

It is necessary to run npm install in every subproject as well as the root.

The root package.json contains a dev script to facilitate simultaneous development of all three components:

npm run dev

Running the script starts a dev server for each, recompiling code on file changes. A reverse proxy (proxy.js in project root) runs the entire application at http://localhost:5000.

If you want to contribute solely to the Obsidian plugin, please pull from the obsidian-note-sharing repo directly.

Before you can store notes in the local development environment, you must migrate the local SQLite database (see next section).

Local database

SQLite is used to store encrypted notes during local development as well as in production.

Before you can store notes during local development, you must migrate the local database:

npx prisma migrate deploy

To update the schema and add new migrations, please take a look at the Prisma docs.

Docker Compose

You can run the docker-compose configuration used on the production server locally using the docker-compose.yml file provided in the project root directory:

docker-compose up --build

The compose configuration will:

1. Build images for the storage server, frontend app, and database migration service.
2. Mount a persistent volume for the SQLite database
3. Run Traefik reverse proxy on port 5000
4. Automatically run prisma migrate deploy to keep the database schema up-to-date.
5. Start the storage service and web application after succesfuly database migration.

Environment variables

Both the webapp and server have use environment variables for configuration.

The documentation for the environment variables of each process are kept in the .env.example files in their respective subdirectories.

Setting environment variables in production

.env files are not used in docker-compose deployments.

Most env variables are set in the docker-compose file directly using the environment property. Build-time variables are set using the args property. See docker-compose.yml for an example.

Deployment

I currently deploy the server + webapp using Docker-compose.

The host web server must combine the two services (webapp at port 3000, server at port 8080) into a single HTTPS service using a reverse proxy. I used Traefik in the example docker-compose. The following route mapping must be applied:

1. https/POST @ /api/note -> http://0.0.0.0:8080/api/note
2. https/GET @ * → http://0.0.0.0:3000/*

The reverse proxy is already set up for HTTP in the example docker compose file. some adaptations are still needed to enable TLS.

[!Warning] Don’t forget to set up TLS! When deploying the application, it is strongly encouraged to run all traffic to the Traefik entrypoint over TLS, e.g. using a self-signed certificate or a cert signed by letsencrypt.

Caching

To limit load on the origin server, traffic to https://noteshare.space/note/* is proxied through Cloudflare servers. By default, Cloudflare does not cache HTML content.

To enable this, I added a custom page rule on noteshare.space/note/* to cache all content.