Markdown Notes Web Service

This is a simple webservice to view, search, and edit your own markdown notes stored in github. This is originally designed to work with my obsidian note collection, but it should work on any collection of markdown notes.

This project is in a very WIP POC State, and is currently just a side project + a way to learn Next.JS. If this gets any traction, I have a lot of feature ideas, but for now this is meant to be simple, hacky, and free to setup.

Features:

• Search all markdown files
• view notes
• edit notes
• simple password protection (single user)

Screenshots

Home page

View a note

Edit a note

Search a note

Setup

Below are instructions on how deploy this to a free Vercel account to privately view and edit your notes.

Step 0

Your markdown notes must already be in github In a seperate repo . I use obsidian with the obsidian-git plugin to sync my notes from the obsidian desktop app to github.

This service will need to read and write to your note repo, which will require a Personal Access Token. If you are using obsidian-git you can reuse the same token, but I would recommend creating a new one

At the end of this you should have TWO repos:

1. your note vault repo - where all the actual note content is saved
2. a fork of this repo

Step 1 - Fork this repo

If you want to easily get future updates to this project, fork this project into your own github project.

Note

The reason for forking this project instead of using it directly -- vercel will clone a public repo into your account which makes it hard to get updates in the future.

Step 2 - Create a personal access token

Create a Personal Access Token for your Note Vault Repo with

• Read/Write access to content
• Read access to meta data

Step 2

1. Create a new account on Vercel if you don't already have one, and connect your github account.

2. Add New > Project

3. Use import git repository > markdown-notes-web

4. Add the following env variables (with your own values)

   GITHUB_TOKEN=github_pat_... # Secret value, keep this in a password manager
   GITHUB_OWNER=<YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME>
   GITHUB_REPO=<YOUR MARKDOWN NOTE REPO NAME> # ex: note-vault
   GITHUB_BRANCH=your_branch_name # your branch name ex: main
   BASIC_AUTH_USER=myusername
   BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD=my-super-strong-password
   
   

5. Hit deploy

If there are no errors, once the deployment is done, you should be able to go to dashboard > markdown-notes-web and find a url for your page.

It will ask you a username and password, which you set above in the ENV variables