SilverBullet

SilverBullet is a Programmable, Private, Browser-based, Open Source, Self Hosted, Personal Knowledge Management Platform.

Yowza! That surely is a lot of adjectives to describe a browser-based Markdown editor programmable with Lua.

Let’s get more specific.

In SilverBullet you keep your content as a collection of Markdown Pages (called a Space). You navigate your space using the Page Picker like a traditional notes app, or through Links like a wiki (except they are bi-directional).

If you are the writer type, you’ll appreciate SilverBullet as a clean Markdown editor with Live Preview. If you have more of an outliner personality, SilverBullet has Outlining tools for you. Productivity freak? Have a look at Tasks. More of a database person? You will appreciate Objects and Queries.

And if you are comfortable programming a little bit — now we’re really talking. You will love dynamically generating content with Space Lua (SilverBullet’s Lua dialect), or to use it to create custom Commands, Page Templates or Widgets.

Much more detail can be found on silverbullet.md

Installing SilverBullet

Check out the instructions.

Developing SilverBullet

SilverBullet's frontend is written in TypeScript and built on top of the excellent CodeMirror 6 editor component. Additional UI is built using Preact. ESBuild) running through Deno is used to build both the front-end.

The server backend is written in Go.

If you're considering contributing changes, be aware of the LLM use policy.

Code structure

• client/: The SilverBullet client, implemented with TypeScript
• server/: The SilverBullet server, written in Go
• plugs: Set of built-in plugs that are distributed with SilverBullet
• libraries: A set of libraries (space scripts, page templates, slash templates) distributed with SilverBullet
• plug-api/: Useful APIs for use in plugs
  • lib/: Useful libraries to be used in plugs
  • syscalls/: TypeScript wrappers around syscalls
  • types/: Various (client) types that can be references from plugs
• bin
  • plug_compile.ts the plug compiler
• scripts/: Useful scripts
• website/: silverbullet.md website content

Requirements

• Deno: Used to build the frontend and plugs
• Go: Used to build the backend

It's convenient to also install air for development, this will automatically rebuild both the frontend and backend when changes are made:

go install github.com/air-verse/air@latest

Make sure your $GOPATH/bin is in your $PATH.

To build everything and run the server:

air <PATH-TO-YOUR-SPACE>

Alternatively, to build:

make

To run the resulting server:

./silverbullet <PATH-TO-YOUR-SPACE>

Useful development tasks

# Clean all generated files
make clean
# Typecheck and lint all code
make check
# Format all code
make fmt
# Run all tests
make test

Build a docker container

Note, you do not need Deno nor Go locally installed for this to work:

docker build -t silverbullet .

To run:

docker run -p 3000:3000 -v <PATH-TO-YOUR-SPACE>:/space silverbullet