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

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 (steps below)

Install SilverBullet

With Deno installed, run:

deno install -f --name silverbullet -A 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 -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. 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. 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

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

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.