Evergreen Fastball

A locally-hosted web app for capturing quick notes across multiple concurrent projects, backed by your Obsidian vault as storage.

The problem

Working across several projects means notes end up buried in daily Obsidian entries and never get filed to the right place. Evergreen Fastball gives you a single always-open tab where you can drop a note against any project in one keystroke — it gets timestamped and appended to that project's Obsidian markdown file automatically.

Features

• Projects dashboard — one row per project with a quick-note input, ADD and LIST buttons, and drag-to-reorder
• Project notes view — all notes for a project, newest first
• Journal view — all notes from all projects combined, newest first, with per-project color badges
• Settings — toggle Enter-to-add, set your local timezone for timestamps, view vault path
• Obsidian is the source of truth — notes are appended under a ## Notes heading in each project's .md file; no separate database

Tech stack

Layer	Choice
Backend	Node.js + Express
Frontend	Vue 3 + Vue Router
Drag-and-drop	vuedraggable (SortableJS)
Build tool	Vite
App state	data.json (project list, order, preferences)
Note storage	Plain .md files in your Obsidian vault

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Getting started

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18+
• An Obsidian vault on your local machine

1. Clone and install

git clone <repo-url>
cd evergreen-fastball

npm install
cd client && npm install && cd ..

2. Configure environment

cp example.env .env

Edit .env and set OBSIDIAN_VAULT to the absolute path of your vault:

OBSIDIAN_VAULT=/home/ian/Documents/MyVault

3. Build the client

npm run build:client

4. Run

npm start

Open http://localhost:6002.

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Development workflow

Run the server and the Vite dev server concurrently. Vite proxies /api requests to the Express server.

# Terminal 1 — Express API server
npm run dev

# Terminal 2 — Vite dev server with hot reload
cd client && npm run dev

The Vue app is available at http://localhost:5173 in dev mode.

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Docker

Build and run

docker compose up --build

Configure docker-compose.yml

Before running, edit docker-compose.yml and replace the vault volume path:

volumes:
  - /path/to/your/obsidian/vault:/vault   # ← replace this
  - ./data.json:/app/data.json

The container serves the app on port 6002.

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Environment variables

Variable	Required	Default	Description
OBSIDIAN_VAULT	Yes	—	Absolute path to your Obsidian vault root
PORT	No	6002	Port the server listens on
DATA_FILE	No	./data.json	Path to the JSON file for project registry and preferences

Variables are loaded from a .env file in the project root (copy from example.env). In Docker, set them via docker-compose.yml.

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Project structure

evergreen-fastball/
├── server/
│   ├── index.js              Express server entry point
│   ├── lib/
│   │   ├── dataStore.js      Read/write data.json
│   │   └── obsidian.js       Parse and write Obsidian markdown files
│   └── routes/
│       ├── projects.js       CRUD + reorder
│       ├── notes.js          Add note, get project notes, journal feed
│       └── preferences.js    Get/update preferences
├── client/
│   ├── src/
│   │   ├── App.vue           Root shell (sidebar + toast)
│   │   ├── api.js            Fetch wrappers for all endpoints
│   │   ├── router/           Vue Router config
│   │   ├── composables/
│   │   │   └── useToast.js   Singleton toast state
│   │   ├── views/
│   │   │   ├── ProjectsView.vue
│   │   │   ├── ProjectNotesView.vue
│   │   │   ├── JournalView.vue
│   │   │   └── SettingsView.vue
│   │   └── components/
│   │       ├── AppSidebar.vue
│   │       ├── ProjectRow.vue
│   │       ├── AddProjectModal.vue
│   │       ├── EditProjectModal.vue
│   │       └── AppToast.vue
│   ├── index.html
│   ├── package.json
│   └── vite.config.js        Dev proxy: /api → localhost:6002
├── docs/                     PRD, screens spec, design notes
├── designs/                  Pencil design files
├── Dockerfile                Multi-stage: Vite build → Express image
├── docker-compose.yml
├── example.env
└── package.json

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API reference

Method	Path	Description
GET	/api/projects	List all projects
POST	/api/projects	Create a project
PUT	/api/projects/:id	Update name or file path
DELETE	/api/projects/:id	Remove a project (Obsidian file untouched)
PUT	/api/projects/reorder	Persist new drag-drop order
GET	/api/notes	Journal: all notes from all projects, newest first
GET	/api/notes/:projectId	Notes for one project, newest first
POST	/api/notes/:projectId	Append a note to the project's Obsidian file
GET	/api/preferences	Get user preferences
PUT	/api/preferences	Update preferences
GET	/api/preferences/vault-path	Read OBSIDIAN_VAULT for the Settings UI

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How notes are stored

Each project maps to an Obsidian markdown file. Notes are appended under a ## Notes heading:

# My Project

## Notes
- 2026-04-29 14:32 — Call with Marcus, wants CSV export by Friday
- 2026-04-28 09:15 — Staging blocked on new DB instance

## References
...

• If the file does not exist it is created automatically (including parent directories).
• If no ## Notes heading exists, one is appended.
• New notes are inserted just before the next heading after ## Notes, so the section stays in chronological order.
• Lines that don't match the - YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM — text format are silently ignored when reading.
• All other content in the file is never touched.