Labradorite Notebook

Labradorite rightfully belongs to the group of wisdom crystals, because it promotes a free flow of mental energy as it awakens intuition and allows us to get mentally unstuck.

- every esoteric out there

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• Rationale
• Features / User Info
• Technical Prerequisites
• Architecture
• Folder Structure
• Major Dependencies
• Run/Deploy with Docker
  • Docker Compose
• Development
• Run it
• Follow-up: Inspiration, Knowledge
  • Tantiny
  • Rails Multi-Model Search

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Rationale

Most Notetaking apps do either too much (Notion), too little (Apple Notes) and lock me in (all options ever).

I wanted something that does just-enough™, in the spirit of a flat file cms. Let me try and wrap it up in a few bullets:

• ownership of the notes (flat files)
  markdown, yaml, attachments all in one place in directories
• easy on the eyes/mind
  I don't want to see all the old stuff I may not need anymore
• a search that shows me snips in the notes
  not just the notes in a sidebar
• a very simple tagging support
• basic file uploads
  keeping the originals side by side with notes

I like to keep things simple, so I once again fell for Roda as the Web Layer. Tantiny is the kicker for this project. I was curious, if I could come up with something useful quickly, not having to deal with a complicated setup or Postgres as a requirement.

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Features / User Info

Markdown Editor

• Preview
• Supports auto-formatting with/around saving (on page refresh)

Attachments

• supported attachments for uploads
  • txt
  • pdf
  • md
  • png
  • jpg
  • jpeg
  • heic
  • webp
  • yml
  • yaml
  • json

Screenshots

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Technical Prerequisites

• Ruby v3.x are tested and ready to roll
• Install a stable version of Rust with Cargo

Architecture

Little experiment on how it rolls:

• all GET gets HTML
• all POST sends FORMS/JSON gets JSON back
• all links/navigation are plain HTML a tags 🤯

Folder Structure

• lib: Library Code / Business Logic
• views: ERB Views
• memos: the Memos/Notes in subdirectories YYYY/MM/DD/random-string
• public: css/js/media
• .tantiny: the local index data created by the tantiny gem

Major Dependencies

• Roda
• Tantiny
• RedCarpet

Run/Deploy with Docker

The included Dockerfile and the docker-compose.yml are more a stub to build upon.

Currently the Dockerfile support passing the USERNAME as an build-arg.

• $ docker build . --build-arg USERNAME=$(whoami) -t labba
• $ docker run --rm -p9292:9292 labba

Either this way, or you adapt the Dockerfile to your needs.

Let's say your username on the server you run (or your machine) is johndoe, then your Dockerfile should look something like this:

# in your version of the Dockerfile, replace labradorite at the ARG USERNAME
ARG USERNAME=johndoe

That will help you both secure the service and have the files being created with the proper rights on the host system.

Docker Compose

build and/or up using: $ USERNAME=$(whoami) docker-compose build

Volumes

• this memos directory has all your created content in it. Having it mounted from your host should make easy for you to backup (if you don't use a private gitrepo for that 😉)
• fyi: having tantiny's index (.tantiny) as a volume has no benefit. Beware, it can easily have a negative impact.

Development

• $ rake test runs the test suite
• $ rake reset_default_memos resets the files to the repos defaults (e.g. for testing)
• $ rake reset_memos clears ALL memos

Before pushing code, you should always run rake reset and rake test,
therefore have a repo you work on AND another you use JUST for running the software.

Run it

Example docker-compose file:

version: '3'
services:
  app:
    user: "${UID}:${GID}"
    environment:
      - USERNAME=yourusername # REPLACE THIS WITH YOUR VPS user's USERNAME
    image: ghcr.io/simonneutert/labradorite-notebook:v0.2.0
    # ports:
    #  - 9292:9292
    command: bundle exec rackup -o0 -Eproduction
    volumes:
      - ./memos:/home/labradorite/memos:cached

Follow-up: Inspiration, Knowledge

Tantiny

https://github.com/baygeldin/tantiny

Rails Multi-Model Search

https://stevepolito.design/blog/search-across-multiple-models-in-rails/

Gist: a searchable table is to be added and kept updated using commit_hooks