Silver Bullet

Silver Bullet (SB) is a highly extensible, open source personal knowledge playground. At its core it’s a Markdown-based writing/note taking application that stores pages (notes) as plain markdown files in a folder referred to as a space. Pages can be cross-linked using the [[link to other page]] syntax. This makes it a simple tool for Personal Knowledge Management. However, once you leverage its various extensions (called plugs) it can feel more like a knowledge playground, allowing you to annotate, combine and query your accumulated knowledge in creative ways, specific to you.

So what is it SB really? That is hard to answer. It can do a ton of stuff out of the box, and I’m constantly finding new use cases. It’s like... a silver bullet!

Below is what it looks like in action (when run on the docs folder in this repo).

And here is a video of me demoing some of its features.

Here’s how I use it today (but this has grown significantly over time):

• Basic note taking, e.g. meeting notes, notes on books I read, blogs I read, podcasts I listen to, movies I watch.
• Getting a quick glance at the work people in my team are doing by pulling data from our 1:1 notes, recent activity on Github (such as recent pull requests) and other sources.
• Writing:
  • My blog is published via SB’s Ghost plugin.
  • An internal newsletter that I write is written in SB.
  • Performance reviews for my team (I work as a people manager) are written and managed using SB (for which I extensively use SB’s meta data features and query that data in various ways).
• A custom SB plugin aggregates data from our OpsGenie account every week, and publishes it to our Mattermost instance.
• It powers part of my smart home: I wired HomeBridge webhooks up to custom HTTP endpoints exposed by my custom smart home SB plug.

That’s a pretty crazy wide range of use cases!

I know, right?

Disclaimer: Silver Bullet is under heavy development and significant changes under the hood happen constantly. It’s also low on automated tests and documentation. All this will improve over time. I’ll do better, I promise.

More documentation can be found in the docs space

Features

• Free and open source
• Minimalistic UI with What You See is What You Mean Markdown editing.
• Future proof: stores all notes in a regular folder with markdown files, no proprietary file formats. While SB uses a SQLite database for indexes, this database can be wiped and rebuilt based on your pages at any time. Your Markdown files are the single source of truth.
• Run anywhere: run it on your local machine, or install it on a server. You access it via your web browser (desktop or mobile), or install it as a PWA (giving it its own window frame and dock/launcher/dock icon).
• Keyboard oriented: you can fully operate SB via the keyboard.
• Extensible through plugs.

Installing and running Silver Bullet

To run a release version, you need to have a recent version of npm (8+) and node.js (16+) installed as well as some basic build infrastructure (make, cpp). Silver Bullet has only been tested on MacOS and Linux thus far.

To install and run, create a folder for your pages (can be empty or an existing folder with .md files) and run:

npx @silverbulletmd/server <path-to-folder>

Optionally you can use the --port argument to specify a HTTP port (defaults to 3000) and you can pass a --password flag to require a password to access. Note this is a rather weak security mechanism, so it’s recommended to add additional layers of security on top of this if you run this on a public server somewhere (at least add TLS). Personally I run it on a tiny Linux VM on my server at home, and use a VPN (Tailscale) to access it from outside my home.

Stack

• Written in TypeScript
• Built on the excellent CodeMirror 6 editor component
• Front-end (beside CodeMirror) is built using React.js
• ParcelJS is used to build both the front-end and back-end
• Backend runs on node.js using express

Development

This Silver Bullet repo is a monorepo using npm's "workspaces" feature.

Requirements:

• node 18+ and npm 8+
• C/C++ compilers (for compiling SQLite, on debian/ubuntu style systems you get these via the build-essential package)
• python v2.7

Note

If you use nvm, you can just nvm install and it should use the right version

Note

On MacOs Monterey, python v2.7 is no longer shipped, if you install pyenv, you can pyenv install and it should use the right version

To run, after clone:

# Install dependencies
npm install
# Run initial build (web app, server, etc.)
npm run build
# Again, to install the CLIs just built (plugos-bundler, silverbullet)
npm install
# Build built-in plugs
npm run build-plugs
# Launch server
npm run server -- <PATH-TO-YOUR-SPACE>

This <PATH-TO-YOUR-SPACE> can be any folder with markdown files, upon first boot SB will ensure there is an index.md file (root page) and PLUGS.md file (with default list of plugs to load). SB will also create a SQLite data.db file with various data caches and indices (you can delete this file at any time and use the Space: Reindex command to reindex everything).

Open SB at http://localhost:3000 If you're using a browser supporting PWAs, you can install this page as a PWA. This also works on iOS (use the "Add to homescreen" option in the share menu).

General development workflow:

Run these in separate terminals

# Runs ParcelJS in watch mode, rebuilding the server and webapp continuously on change
npm run watch
# Runs the silverbullet server
npm run server -- <PATH-TO-YOUR-SPACE>
# Builds (and watches for changes) all builtin plugs (in packages/plugs)
npm run plugs