silverbullet/website/Install/Local.md

Let’s start with the simplest, local machine setup:

Local machine setup

Installing SilverBullet as a (local) web server is pretty straightforward, if you’re comfortable with the terminal, at least.

The setup is simple: in a terminal run the silverbullet server process on your machine, then connect to it locally from your browser.

You have two options here:

1. Installation via Deno (the awesome JavaScript runtime)
2. Installation via Docker (the awesome container runtime)

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. Install SilverBullet itself (steps below)

After having installed Deno (instructions on its website) run:

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

You only have to do this once.

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

Either command 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 simple password protection.

Once downloaded and booted, SilverBullet will print out a URL to open SB in your browser.

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:0.5.5. 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.

To upgrade, simply pull the latest docker image and start a new container.

docker pull zefhemel/silverbullet

Configuration

SilverBullet is partially configured via flags (run it with --help) or alternatively via environment variables and partially via a SETTINGS page in your space.

Environment variables

$env You can configure SB with environment variables instead of flags, which is probably what you want to do in a docker setup. 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)
• SB_SYNC_ONLY: Runs the server in a "dumb" space store only mode (not indexing content or keeping other state), e.g. SB_SYNC_ONLY=1