Taking notes with Bookstack

 I've been looking to use a different note taking tool than Confluence - only because I want to have my stuff self-hosted, so I've been poking around at a few different options. I've played with rwMarkable, Trillium, Notion and others. Suffice to say, I've been down a rabbit hole on this... and I've ended up on Bookstack.

You can find the website here: https://www.bookstackapp.com/  Self-hosted is very attractive to me at the moment. I really don't have a lot of love for having my data out there with anyone else - especially US based companies. There's a bit of uncertainty out there with the behaviour of the US government, so I'd prefer to repatriate my data where possible.

So I needed somewhere I could punch a heap of written data, with some features, a nice editor and not too hard to manage. Happily, I discovered Bookstack.

Under Proxmox, I set up an LXC (Linux Container) and then using a script from https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=bookstack I installed my instance fairly simply! It's running with 1 vCPU, 1GB of RAM and 4GB of disk space - it's hardly the biggest VM I'm running (ah the beauty of the LXC in all it's glory!). Even with these modest specifications, I've found it to run very efficiently, easily uploading images and managing some quite sizeable documents.

Here's a screenshot of what my page looks like:

I have two "Shelves" and each Shelf has multiple books in it. I won't show them - there's secret stuff in there :-)

While it's hosted on my Proxmox server internally, I've used Cloudflare tunnels to provide me with a nice Zero Trust way to access my own systems from anywhere. MFA + Conditional Access all courtesy of the Cloudflare's free tier. Additionally, and I can't shout this out enough - I used Cloudflare for all my DNS which means that managing tunnels and published applications is that much easier. It's a lovely way to do things and I'm praying that we don't get a bunch of enshittification take place. For the moment, it's a wonderful way to do things.

But onto Bookstack - it's a nice WYSIWYG interface. I'm using the dark theme and it looks like this: 

Now, here's a tip - up until about 2 hours ago, it didn't quite look like this. Make sure in the .env file that you have the correct URL or things won't work properly - drafts won't save, the scroll bar won't work, and the text on the dark page will be black not white. Easily fixed by up sorting out the .env file and then running the php update command. 

Bookstack is a nice, lightweight application and works very well. Combined with the easy Proxmox backups, I have found it to be an excellent system for keeping my documentation together. Try it out!