silverbullet/website/🔌 Collab.md

---
type: plug
repo: https://github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet
share-support: true
---

The Collab plug implements real-time “Google Doc” style collaboration with other Silver Bullet users using the [Yjs](https://yjs.dev) library. It supports:

* Real-time editing
* Showing other participant’s cursors and selections

The philosophy behind this plug is that by default your data is private and not shared with others. However, there are cases where you would like to collaborate on individual pages. 

Some example use cases:

* Sharing a meeting agenda or meeting notes
* Writing or editing an article with others

The collab plug allows you to share individual pages. All collaborators will keep their own local copy on disk (which they can back up, and you probably should), but the “source of truth” moves to a central collaboration server. There is one deployed at `wss://collab.silverbullet.md`, but you can also run your own, see [[@deploy|the instructions below]]. The collab plugin leverages SB’s [[🔌 Share]] infrastructure.

To use it:

1. Open a page you would like to collaborate on
2. Run the {[Share: Collab]} command and select the collab server to use (an open one runs at `wss://collab.silverbullet.md`)
3. Copy & paste the `collab:...` URI that is injected into the `$share` [[Frontmatter]] and send to a collaborator **or** if your collaborator is not (yet) a Silver Bullet user, you can use the silverbullet.md website (which is an SB instance) directly via the `https://silverbullet.md/collab:...` URL scheme.
4. If your collaborator is an SB user, have them use the {[Share: Join Collab]} command, or directly open the `collab:...` URI as a page in Silver Bullet (both do the same).
5. If the collaborator wants to keep a persistent copy of the page collaborated page, they can simply _rename_ the page to something not prefixed with `collab:`. Everything will keep working for as long as the `collab:` will appear in the `$share` attribute of [[Frontmatter]]

## How it works
The Collab plug uses Yjs for real-time collaboration via a WebSocket. A random ID is assigned to every shared page, and a copy of this page (as well as its history) will be stored on the collaboration server. Therefore, be cautious about what you share, especially when using a public collab server like `collab.silverbullet.md`. For “production use” we recommend deploying your own collab server.

## Deploying your own collab server
$deploy
A detailed description of how to deploy your own collab server [can be found here](https://github.com/yjs/y-websocket). The short version is:

```shell
HOST=0.0.0.0 PORT=1337 YPERSISTENCE=./store npx y-websocket
```

This will run the `y-websocket` server on port 1337, and store page data persistently in `./store`. You can connect to this server via `ws://ip:1337`. To use SSL, put a TLS server in front of it, in which case you can use `wss://` instead.