Silver Bullet

Silver Bullet (SB) is an extensible, open source personal knowledge platform. At its core it’s a clean markdown-based writing/note taking application that stores your pages (notes) as plain markdown files in a folder referred to as a space. Pages can be cross-linked using the [[link to other page]] syntax. This makes it a simple tool for Personal Knowledge Management. However, once you leverage its various extensions (called plugs) it can feel more like a knowledge platform, allowing you to annotate, combine and query your accumulated knowledge in creative ways specific to you.

For more in-depth information, an interactive demo, and links to more background, check out the Silver Bullet website (published from this repo’s website/ folder).

Or checkout these two videos:

Features

  • Free and open source. Silver Bullet is MIT licensed.
  • The truth is in the markdown. Silver Bullet doesn’t use proprietary file formats. It keeps its data as plain markdown files on disk. While SB uses a database for indexing and caching some indexes, all of that can be rebuilt from its markdown source at any time. If SB would ever go away, you can still read your pages with any text editor.
  • One single, distraction free mode. SB doesn’t have a separate view and edit mode. It doesn’t have a “focus mode.” You’re always in focused edit mode, why wouldn’t you?
  • Keyboard oriented. You can use SB fully using the keyboard, typin’ the keys.
  • Extend it your way. SB is highly extensible with plugs, and you can customize it to your liking and your workflows.

Installing Silver Bullet with Deno

Installing Deno

Silver Bullet is built using Deno. To install Deno on Linux or Mac run:

curl -fsSL https://deno.land/install.sh | sh

This will install Deno into ~/.deno/bin, add this folder to your PATH in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc file.

To install Deno on Windows (using Powershell) run:

irm https://deno.land/install.ps1 | iex

Install Silver Bullet

With Deno installed (see instruction above), 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 installed Deno following the previous instructions).

To run Silver Bullet 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, SB will bind to port 3000 on all interfaces. To specify a different address or port to listen on, use the --hostname and --port options. By default SB doesn’t add authentication, to add basic password authentication (BasicAuth), pass the --user flag (e.g. --user pete:1234 for username pete and password 1234).

Once downloaded and booted, SB will print out a URL to open SB in your browser (spoiler alert: by default this will be http://localhost:3000 ).

#protip: If you have a PWA enabled browser (like any browser based on Chromium) hit that little button right of the location bar to install SB, and give it its own window frame (sans location bar) and desktop/dock icon. At last the PWA has found its killer app.

Upgrading Silver Bullet

Simply run this:

silverbullet upgrade

And restart Silver Bullet. You should be good to go.

Installing Silver Bullet 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

Troubleshooting

If you upgraded to the new Deno-based Silver Bullet from an old version, you may have to use the silverbullet fix <pages-path> command to flush out your old database and plugs. Plugs will likely need to be updated.

Developing Silver Bullet

Open in Gitpod

Silver Bullet is written in TypeScript and built on top of the excellent CodeMirror 6 editor component. Additional UI is built using Preact. ESBuild is used to build both the front-end and back-end bundles. The server backend runs as a HTTP server on Deno using and is written using Oak.

To prepare the initial web and plug build run:

deno task build

To symlink silverbullet to your locally checked-out version, run:

deno task install

You can then run the server in “watch mode” (automatically restarting when you change source files) with:

deno task watch-server <PATH-TO-YOUR-SPACE>

After this initial build, it’s convenient to run three commands in parallel (in separate terminals):

deno task watch-web
deno task watch-server <PATH-TO-YOUR-SPACE>
deno task watch-plugs

Feedback

If you (hypothetically) find bugs or have feature requests, post them in our issue tracker. Would you like to contribute? Check out the code, and the issue tracker as well for ideas on what to work on.