Guided setup for the published Docker image

[UtsavShankar]

Hi! I set out to run the remote-hosted version of ZenNotes today, on Google Cloud, since I switch between systems a lot and wanted my vault living somewhere persistent and my homelab setup is still in the making

Context: I'm comfortable programming and self-hosting in general. My actual goal was just to get ZenNotes running on a cloud VM and get back to using it, not to spend time on infrastructure.

The friction: the "fastest way to self-host" published-image flow ended up being several manual steps, generate a token, create the vault/data folders, run the docker command with the right flags, then work out the bind address and port myself. I think that section of the docs is aimed at exactly the kind of user who doesn't want to tinker and just wants it working, so I'd expect a single command to get there, not a sequence to follow.

Proposal: a small setup script (or equivalent) that:

Generates the auth token automatically and prints it at the end, rather than requiring the user to generate and manage it themselves
Prompts for bind address, defaulting to 127.0.0.1 if the user enters nothing. Loopback-only is the right default (safe, no accidental exposure), but a user who does want it reachable, like my case, should be able to opt in with one input instead of editing the command by hand
Prompts for port the same way, defaulting to 7878 if left blank, rather than requiring it be set manually

One idea I had, then talked myself out of while writing this up: passing the token as a URL query parameter for a one-click connect link. I noticed the docs mention the browser client intentionally moved away from tokens in URLs toward session cookies for security reasons, so that's probably not the right direction, flagging it mainly so it's explicitly ruled out rather than silently skipped.

Happy to help build this if there's appetite, mainly wanted to describe the actual experience first.