silverbullet/website/Install/Local.md

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

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

You have two options here:

1. Installation via $deno (the awesome JavaScript runtime)
2. Installation via $docker (the awesome container runtime)

Installing using 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 -L0.0.0.0 flag (0.0.0.0 for all connections, or insert a specific address to limit the host), combined with --user username:password to add simple Authentication.

Once downloaded and booted, SilverBullet will print out a URL to open 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. Also run

deno upgrade

Regularly, to get the latest and greatest deno.

Installing using 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. Most people run 64-bit OSes these days, an exception may be Raspberry Pis. Recent (RPI 3 and later) can run 64-bit Linux as well, you may have to re-image, though.

A few key things to note on the SilverBullet container:

• The container binds to port 3000, so be sure to export that, e.g. via -p 3000:3000
• The container uses whatever is volume-mapped to /space as the space root folder. You can connect a docker volume, or a host folder to this, e.g. -v /home/myuser/space:/space
• SilverBullet runs under Linux user id (uid) 1000 and group id (gid) 1000 inside the container. Conveniently, in most Linux distros this is the UID of the first non-root user you create. However, make sure that the space folder you mount into the container is owned by uid 1000. You can ensure this using: chown -R 1000:1000 /path/to/space/folder.

To boot up the container:

docker run -p 3000:3000 -v /path/to/space/folder:/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

Upgrade

You can upgrade your image simply by pulling a new version of the image using docker pull zefhemel/silverbullet. However, it is recommended you use a tool like watchtower to automatically update your docker images and restart them.

Docker compose

Here is a simple docker-compose.yml that runs SilverBullet as well as watchtower, which will check for new SilverBullet upgrades daily (the default) and upgrade automatically.

Instructions:

• Please replace the password defined in SB_USER with something sensible such as admin:b3stp4ssword3vah
• This volume uses the notes directory (that presumably exists) in the same directory as the docker-compose.yml file as the place where SB will keep its space. This folder is owned by UID 1000.

services:
  silverbullet:
    image: zefhemel/silverbullet:edge
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
    - SB_USER="admin:admin"
    volumes:
      - ./notes:/space
    ports:
      - 3000:3000
  watchtower:
    image: containrrr/watchtower
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

Boot this up via:

docker-compose up -d

And watch for logs with:

docker-compose logs -f

Building the docker image

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

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. This will disable the Online Client Modes altogether (and not even show the sync icon in the top bar). Conceptually, silverbullet.md runs in this mode.