Notabula

A self-hosted, multi-user notes app modeled on iOS Notes — live WYSIWYG editing, folders, pinned notes, and checklists — installable as a PWA on any device. Your notes live on your own server, and they're never locked in: full export and import, and a one-click restore from backup.

Features

• WYSIWYG editor — bold/italic/underline/highlight, headings, bullet/numbered/check lists, block quotes, inline images. Formatting renders live; raw markup is never shown.
• Organization — nested folders, #hashtag tags with autocomplete, pinning, full-text search, and smart views (Media, Links, Open Tasks, Locked, Last 7 Days).
• Rich link previews — any URL in any note unfurls into a title/description/image card.
• Multi-user & sharing — private notes by default; share notes or folders with viewer/editor roles, or mint a secret "anyone with the link" link. Edit history with word-level redline and restore.
• Locked notes — client-side encryption (PBKDF2 → AES-GCM); the server only ever stores ciphertext.
• Offline-first PWA — read everywhere offline; edits and new notes queue and sync when the connection returns.
• Own your data — export everything as a zip (plain text + images + lossless JSON), import it back, nightly server-side backups, and an admin one-click restore.
• Accounts — username + password with long-lived sessions, optional TOTP two-factor. First run bootstraps the admin; admins manage everyone else.

Quick start

cp .env.example .env
cp backend/.env.example backend/.env
# edit both: set a real POSTGRES_PASSWORD and SECRET_KEY

(cd pwa && npm install && npm run build)
docker compose up -d --build

open http://localhost:8200

Register the first account — it becomes the admin. Set ALLOW_REGISTRATION=false in backend/.env once everyone you want has an account.

Deploying to a NAS / server with prebuilt images: see DEPLOY.md.

Stack

• Backend — FastAPI (async), PostgreSQL 16 (JSONB + generated tsvector), Alembic, Docker
• PWA — React 19 + TypeScript + Vite, TipTap (ProseMirror) editor, vite-plugin-pwa (IndexedDB offline)
• Proxy — Nginx serving the built PWA and proxying /api and /media

Note bodies are stored as ProseMirror JSON; the first line of a note is its title, iOS-style. Deletes are soft (30-day "Recently Deleted"), and concurrent edits are version-checked so a second device can't silently clobber the first.

Development

docker compose up -d db               # database only (host port 5433)

cd backend && pip install -r requirements.txt
uvicorn app.main:app --reload        # http://localhost:8000

cd pwa && npm run dev                # http://localhost:5175 (proxies /api)

Tests: cd backend && python -m pytest

License

AGPL-3.0 — if you run a modified version as a network service, you must offer its source to users.