silverbullet/website/Install.md

Installing SilverBullet as a (local) web server is pretty straightforward.

The idea is simple: you run the web server (instructions below), point your browser at it, and go, go, go! You can access the URL via your desktop browser but also a mobile one. You could even go full-on YOLO (that’s a technical term), and install it on a public cloud server somewhere and access it that way (be sure to at least enable authentication and put SSL on top of it, though).

You have two options to install and run SilverBullet as a server:

1. Installation via Deno on your host system
2. Running it with Docker

In either case, check the notes @tls.

Installation via Deno

$deno This consists of two steps (unless Deno is already installed — in which case we’re down to one):

1. Install Deno
2. Installing SilverBullet itself (steps below)

Install SilverBullet

With Deno installed, run:

deno install -f --name silverbullet --unstable -A https://get.silverbullet.md

This will give you (and when you use silverbullet upgrade) the latest stable release. If you prefer to live on the bleeding edge, you can install using the following command instead:

deno install -f --name silverbullet --unstable -A https://silverbullet.md/silverbullet.js

This will install silverbullet into your ~/.deno/bin folder (which should already be in your $PATH if you followed the Deno install instructions).

To run SilverBullet, create a folder for your pages (it can be empty or be an existing folder with .md files) and run the following command in your terminal:

silverbullet <pages-path>

By default, SilverBullet will bind to port 3000; to use a different port, use the -p flag.

For security reasons, by default, SilverBullet only allows connections via localhost (or 127.0.0.1). To also allow connections from the network, pass a -L 0.0.0.0 flag (0.0.0.0 for all connections, or insert a specific address to limit the host), ideally combined with --user username:password to add BasicAuth password protection.

Once downloaded and booted, SilverBullet will print out a URL to open SB in your browser. Please make note of @tls.

Upgrading SilverBullet

SilverBullet is regularly updated. To get the latest and greatest, simply run:

silverbullet upgrade

And restart SilverBullet. You should be good to go.

Installing SilverBullet with Docker

$docker There is a docker image on docker hub. The image comes in two flavors:

• 64-bit Intel
• 64-bit ARM (e.g. for Raspberry Pis and Macs)

There is no 32-bit version of Deno, and therefore we cannot offer a 32-bit version of SilverBullet either.

To use the docker container, first create a volume to keep your space (markdown) files:

docker volume create myspace

Then, run the container, e.g., as follows:

docker run -p 3000:3000 -v myspace:/space -d zefhemel/silverbullet

The zefhemel/silverbullet image will give you the latest released version. This is equivalent to zefhemel/silverbullet:latest. If you prefer, you can also pin to a specific release, e.g. zefhemel/silverbullet:0.3.7. If you prefer to live on the bleeding edge, you can use the zefhemel/silverbullet:edge image, which is updated on every commit to the main brain.

To configure various things such as authentication, use @env, e.g. to enable single-user auth:

docker run -p 3000:3000 -v myspace:/space -d -e SB_USER=me:letmein zefhemel/silverbullet

To build your own version of the docker image, run ./scripts/build_docker.sh.

You can also use docker-compose if you prefer. From a silverbullet check-out run:

PORT=3000 docker-compose up

or similar.

To upgrade, simply pull the latest docker image (rebuilt and pushed after every commit to "main") and start the new container.

docker pull zefhemel/silverbullet

Running SilverBullet on your network/Internet

$tls For SilverBullet to be offline capable (loadable without a network connection) it needs to be accessed either via localhost or via TLS (a https://) URL. The most straightforward way to do this is by using Caddy. Caddy can automatically provision an SSL certificate for you.

When you’re deploying on a public server accessible to the Internet, you can do this as follows:

$ sudo caddy reverse-proxy --to :3000 --from yourdomain.com:443

If you’re deploying on a local network and access your server via a VPN, this is a bit more tricky. The recommended setup here is to use Tailscale which now supports TLS certificates for your VPN servers. Once you have this enabled, get a certificate via:

$ tailscale cert yourserver.yourtsdomain.ts.net

Caddy can automatically find these certificates once provisioned, so you can just run:

$ sudo caddy reverse-proxy --to :3000 --from yourserver.yourtsdomain.ts.net:443

If you access SilverBullet via plain HTTP (outside of localhost) everything should still mostly work, except offline mode.

Environment variables

$env You can configure SB with environment variables instead of flags as well. The following environment variables are supported:

• SB_USER: Sets single-user credentials (like --user), e.g. SB_USER=pete:1234
• SB_HOSTNAME: Set to the hostname to bind to (defaults to 127.0.0.0, set to 0.0.0.0 to accept outside connections)
• SB_PORT: Sets the port to listen to, e.g. SB_PORT=1234
• SB_FOLDER: Sets the folder to expose, e.g. SB_FOLDER=/space
• SB_AUTH: Loads an Authentication database from a (JSON encoded) string, e.g. SB_AUTH=$(cat /path/to/.auth.json)

Using Authelia

You need to adjust a few configuration options in Authelia in order for SilverBullet to work as intended.