Notea

[infogulch]

Notea / https://github.com/QingWei-Li/notea

Self hosted note taking app stored on S3. Notea is a privacy-first, open-source note-taking application. It supports Markdown syntax, sharing, responsive and more.

Brought to my attention by @yusf on Notion-like FOSS app thread.

[infogulch]

I'm gonna try to package it up for Cloudron this evening and report back here with my results.

[infogulch]

I started a cloudron app package for Notea, you can find the source here: https://source.infogulch.com/infogulch/notea-app If anyone wants to try it, the docker image for this source is infogulch/notea-app:0.0.1-6.

I did run into some trouble after getting it to start successfully:

• I'm using a minio instance on the same cloudron as the data store for Notea since it doesn't support local file storage directly. This means that it's a bit awkward to configure; after installing the app, open the terminal and edit /app/data/env.sh to add the s3/minio backend storage config, then restart the app.
• I used proxyAuth because I think it's the bees knees but that mostly just caused me extra problems because the notea app implements authentication itself and redirects to /login which obviously doesn't work very well with proxyauth. I did open an issue to request an option to disable the login page.
  • In the meantime, it would probably be more expedient to relent and disable proxyAuth, and use notea's built-in authentication which is just a password configured by setting the PASSWORD env var in env.sh

[infogulch]

That's a neat thing about catching a project in the early stages: easy feature requests are likely to be accepted. I updated to the latest version and adjusted how the image is built. The updated docker image is now at infogulch/notea-app:0.0.1-9.

This works with proxyauth, but I'm not sure if my minio config is working correctly. I wonder if it would be a good idea to just package up minio with this app in the same image...

[thetomester13]

@infogulch that's awesome! I actually ran this earlier (before disabling the app's auth was implemented) and it worked great with my Minio instance installed on its own. Main issue is that Firefox is my main browser and I'm not able to handle the checkboxes properly (created an issue here), but that's a problem for another day all this to say, don't think this needs to be packaged with Minio, but the fact that it uses Minio does make it slightly more difficult for the non-technical user to use. Potentially the example.env.sh could have minio.cloudron.url already baked in? Then they just need to add the credentials.

[girish]

@infogulch Great progress! Do you know if they have any plans for just storing things in the filesystem? Why does a note taking app have to store on minio/s3? Notes cannot possibly require so much space no?

[infogulch]

@girish I'm not sure. It is intended to support image and other media uploads, so perhaps they're looking at long term consumption with such media. There is an open issue about it, and user diamkil seems to be pursuing the bundled-minio image strategy. The reddit thread mentions local storage throughout.

The current storage provider implementation seems to serve files by providing the client an s3-style signed url. Perhaps a new provider could be written that provides a file url that just points to the server itself, I guess requests would be authenticated by the usual domain cookies.

[ei8fdb]

@girish said in Notea:

Why does a note taking app have to store on minio/s3? Notes cannot possibly require so much space no?

From observing how people now write notes, I can see how individual notes could require a lot of space - I've seen colleagues, and other people create "rich" notes with hi-res (10-12+ Mb) images, 50+ Mb video files commonly.

From looking at some of my notes, they can be essentially "containers" with 5-10 hi-res pictures.