Documara: Notes App That Treasures Your Data

This is a dusty old project of mine. It's a web-based note-taking app that utilises Operational Transformation to sync notes.

This means it handles conflicts automatically and you should never lose anything you enter, even if you have the app open on multiple windows and type into them all at the same time.

For some motivation behind this project, see:

https://aimlesslygoingforward.com/blog/2017/05/25/documara/

This is essentially a code-dump of a private repo. I'm happy to answer question but be prepared to do some spelunking.

TODO: move the code to sharedb?

https://github.com/share/sharedb

Seems to be the maintained successor of sharejs. Let's investigate.

Development

Prerequisities: node, npm and redis
yum install nodejs npm redis
Install dependencies: $ npm install
Run Redis: $ redis-server redis/redis.conf
Run documara: $ make run

Adding a user

Run this:

$ EMAIL=me@example.com PASSWORD=password \
    node_modules/coffee-script/bin/coffee appserver.coffee --create-user

You should of course specify your own EMAIL and PASSWORD values. Redis has to be running for this to work, the app doesn't have to.

Production

You should compile the static assets. They should be served by an asset server such as nginx. When running documara, set these environment variables:

NODE_ENV=production
PORT=8080  # or whatever
SESSION_SECRET=<a long secret string, shouldn't change when app restarts>

Docker

Get the images:

sudo docker pull redis:3
sudo docker pull tsedovic/node:$VERSION
sudo docker build -t tsedovic/documara:latest .

Push the images to the registry:

export VERSION=0.3.0   # This should match the `LABEL version` in Dockerfile
sudo docker tag tsedovic/documara:latest tsedovic/documara:$VERSION
sudo docker push tsedovic/documara:$VERSION
sudo docker push tsedovic/documara:latest

Run redis database:

sudo docker run -v /var/lib/docker/volumes/documara-redis:/data  \
    -d --name documara-redis redis:3 redis-server  \
    --appendonly yes --appendfsync everysec

NOTE: the data will be stored on the host at:

$ docker inspect  -f "{{range .Mounts}}{{.Source}}{{end}}" documara-redis

Which is generally under /var/lib/docker/volumes/.

Create users:

sudo docker run --rm -t -i --link documara-redis:redis \
    -e EMAIL=test@example.com \
    -e PASSWORD=password tsedovic/documara \
    /create-user

Run documara application:

sudo docker run --link documara-redis:redis -d --name documara-app  \
    -p $HOST_PORT:8080 tsedovic/documara

License

AGPLv3 or later

Author

Tomas Sedovic tomas@sedovic.cz https://aimlesslygoingforward.com/ IRC: shadower

tomassedovic/documara