GitHub - sheshbabu/zen: Selfhosted notes app. Single golang binary, notes stored as markdown within SQLite, full-text search, very low resource usage

Zen

Live Demo • Features • Updates

Features

Single Go binary or Docker Compose
Low resource usage
Standard Markdown files, local SQLite database
Organize with flexible tags, not rigid folders
Markdown features like tables, code blocks, task lists, highlights, and more
Full-text search with BM25 ranking
Import and export data with full portability
Templates
Pinned notes
Archive and soft delete notes
Minimal dependency footprint
Automated backups (via Zen Backup)

Experimental Features

Canvas for spatial organization of notes and images (stored as JSON Canvas)
Semantic search for notes and images (via Zen Intelligence)
Similar images (via Zen Intelligence)
MCP for searching, listing and reading notes

Installation

Build from source

Local Development

Run the application using default configuration

Run the application in watch mode

Install air and esbuild

$ go install github.com/air-verse/air@latest
$ go install github.com/evanw/esbuild/cmd/esbuild@latest

Schema Migrations

Create new migration file under ./migrations
Use the format <version>_<title>.sql

Image Versioning

$ git tag x.y.z
$ git push origin x.y.z

Contributions

This is a personal project built for my own use. The codebase is available for forking and modifications. Note that I may not actively review pull requests or respond to issues due to time constraints.

Zen