silverbullet/website/Server.md

Installing SilverBullet as a (local) web server is the most mature, and most flexible way to install SilverBullet. If mature and flexible is your thing, try this option!

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. This makes it a great option to access your space from various devices without requiring any type of sync. 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

Installation via Deno

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

1. Install Deno (if you’re using a Raspberry Pi, follow Raspberry Pi Installation-specific instructions)
2. Installing SilverBullet itself

Install SilverBullet

With Deno installed, run:

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

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 --port 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 --hostname 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. Credentials can also be specified with the SB_USER environment variable, SB_USER=username:password. If both are specified, the --user flag takes precedence.

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

There is a docker image on docker hub. To use it, 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 --name silverbullet zefhemel/silverbullet

If you'd like to pass in additional command line arguments (e.g. --user to add authentication) you can just append those to the command, e.g.:

docker run -p 3000:3000 -v myspace:/space -d --name silverbullet zefhemel/silverbullet --user me:letmein

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