carbon

An opinionated online text editor, self-hosted & Git-powered.

Like a carbon paper, through this app you can edit your text files in a single, flat directory on your server.

Aims to be alternative to Google Keep, Simplenote, Evernote, and so on.

demo site (Without the git feature; reset every 15 minutes)

breaking change on v2

• Renew the architecture overall.
  • Use React and react-router for the client side.
  • Rust (axum) for the server side.
  • Just one docker image to launch the app.

If you receive Permission denied error when upgrading from v1, please execute the command below.

# chown -R $(id -u):$(id -g) /path/to/data

features

• No collaborative editing – it's designed for individual use.
• No fancy editing feature such as WYSIWYG or image rendering.
• To keep things straightforward, no tags, categories, or subdirectories
• Press Ctrl + Enter in the textarea to save the change.
  • Optionally, the change can be automatically added and commited to the Git repository.
• Tab to indent, Tab + Shift to unindent.
• Texts with .md extension are converted to html in the view mode.
• Search powered by fd-find and ripgrep (regex pattern supported).

deploy

Here, assume that you store text files in /path/to/data.

1. If you'd like to use the git feature, create a git repository in your data. After that, add user.name and user.email to data/.git/config like this:

[user]
    name = Kyohei Uto
    email = "[email protected]"

If you do not want the git feature, skip this step and go on to the next (and final) one.

2. Use docker compose up -d with docker-compose.yml. For example:

version: "3"
services:
  carbon:
    image: docker.io/kyoheiudev/carbon:2.0.4
    container_name: carbon
    user: "1000:1000" # UID and GID that created git repository.
    volumes:
      - "./data:/carbon/data:rw"
      - "/etc/passwd:/etc/passwd:ro"
      - "/etc/group:/etc/group:ro"
    environment:
      - CARBON_GIT=on # requited to enable the git feature
      - CARBON_GIT_USER=carbon # default to 'carbon'
      - [email protected] # default to '[email protected]'
    ports:
      - 3000:3000
    logging:
      driver: json-file
      options:
        max-size: 1m
        max-file: "3"

And the app will start listening on port 3000.

tech stack

• client side
  • React, react-router
  • tailwind, PrimeReact
• server side
  • Rust(axum)
  • libgit2

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome!

If you have an idea for a new feature, please create an issue before making PR.

Development

Prerequisites

• npm for the clientside
• cargo for the server side

cd client && npm i
cd .. && make dev

For details, see Makefile.