Note text was encrypted from the start; the files beside it were not. A
copy of the uploads directory handed over every image in the clear while
the notes referring to them stayed unreadable — half a protection, and
the half that is easiest to walk off with.
Same key and cipher as note content, so a backup is worth exactly as much
as its .env either way, which was already true and is now true uniformly.
Files carry an INKENC01 header and say for themselves whether they are
encrypted. That is what makes the startup sweep idempotent, and it had to
be the file rather than a database row: attachments are shared between
users by content hash, so no single row owns one.
Named by the hash of the plaintext, so identical uploads still collapse
into one copy — a fresh IV per file would have defeated deduplication.
Read whole rather than streamed, because GCM only proves integrity at the
last block. Written through a temporary name and renamed, so a crash
cannot strand a half-encrypted file that would fail its tag forever.
Verified: the one existing attachment went from 78 to 114 bytes with the
header in front, a second start did nothing, and images still load in the
browser after a reload.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The vector clocks in the server were never reached: no client sent one,
so the branch was dead and every write was a blind overwrite. Not "the
newer edit wins" — "the request that arrives last wins", which is worse:
a phone that was offline all day buries the laptop's newer work simply by
reconnecting late.
Each write now carries baseUpdatedAt, the revision it was written on top
of. If the note has moved on since, the incoming edit still wins — a
rejection would throw away what was just typed — but the state it
replaces is kept as a version marked "conflict", so both exist and the
history is where you choose. Clocks could have told a real conflict from
a device catching up, but that precision only pays off with a merge
interface, and this reuses the version history already built.
adoptRevision() stores the revision the server reports back, or the
second save in a row would be flagged as conflicting with the first.
Also removed, as agreed:
- POST /api/notes/pdf — accepted PDFs that nothing could ever read back,
with no retrieval route and no viewer. The readme advertised "PDF
Import & Annotation"; that claim is gone too.
- POST /api/sync — a batch endpoint the client never called.
- the tags column — notebooks, starring and search already cover it.
Columns on existing databases are left in place. Dropping them buys
nothing and is not worth touching a live database for.
Tables now have a right-click menu (editor/tableMenu.js) for rows,
columns, header and merging. It needs stopPropagation: without it the
same event reaches window, where the menu that is mounting reads it as a
click elsewhere and closes instantly — the reason the other context menus
in App.jsx already do this.
92 browser checks across seven suites, 125 unit tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two questions instead of one, because the answers depend on each other:
Markdown holds text only, a PNG holds the drawing only, PDF holds both.
Listing every format flat would have offered combinations that cannot
exist. A note without a drawing skips the first step rather than showing
it mostly greyed out.
While testing that, the drawings turned out never to have made it into
any export at all — not the ZIP, not the PDF. strokeDocOf() *builds* a
stroke document from a bare array, and it was being handed one that was
already a document, so the strokes ended up nested one level too deep and
every length check read undefined. Nothing complained; the export simply
came out without the drawing. It went unnoticed because the notes the
earlier suite exported had none.
Now uses docStrokes(), and the suite draws on a note before exporting it,
checks the PNG's magic bytes, and checks it is 159 KB rather than an empty
white page — a check on the file merely existing would have passed against
the broken version too.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The reason to build this is not a missing feature — it is that trusting a
program you maintain alone with years of notes should not mean the notes
can only ever be read by that program.
Reachable from a note's toolbar, a notebook's context menu, and Account →
Alle Notizen exportieren.
Markdown carries over everything with an equivalent: headings, lists,
quotes, code, tables, and task state as `- [x]`. A link to another note in
the same export becomes a relative link to its file; a link to a note
outside it degrades to the plain title rather than leaving a dead
reference. Notes with images or a drawing arrive as a ZIP so the files
travel along, and a multi-note export gets a README index.
PDF goes through the browser's print dialog rather than a bundled PDF
library — the browser already has a good one, and it is the only format
where drawings sit inside the document. Markdown gets them as a PNG
beside the text, with a line saying so, because dropping them silently
would be the wrong kind of quiet.
Two decisions worth recording:
- the ZIP writer is eighty lines here rather than a dependency. Note text
is small and images are already compressed, so compression bought
nothing, and stored entries are a handful of fixed-layout records.
- Markdown escaping only covers what changes meaning mid-line, plus a
leading list or heading marker. Escaping every character Markdown ever
uses turns a sentence into `Hallo\. Alles gut\!`, which defeats the
point of choosing a readable format.
42 unit tests on the serialiser and the archive format, plus a browser
suite that unpacks a real download and reads the bytes back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
They lived in a scratch directory under /tmp, which was cleared overnight;
four of the five were simply gone. Whatever they were worth, they were
worth nothing kept there.
Rewritten against a shared lib.mjs. The old ones registered their users
through the sign-up form, which no longer exists — each suite now creates
a throwaway account through the admin API and deletes it afterwards, so a
run leaves the database as it found it. The previous generation left nine
accounts behind; those are gone too.
Three test hooks went into the app, each of which earns its place beyond
testing: aria-label on the note title (the sidebar search box is also a
text input, and a screen reader could not tell them apart either),
data-note-row on list rows, data-user on admin rows.
Two suites were flaky in ways worth naming, because both were the test
misreading the app rather than the app misbehaving:
- ticking a task then inserting a note link put the link inside the task
list, since Control+End lands there. Verified against the server that
the tick itself persists correctly; the suite now leaves the list first
and asserts where the link ended up.
- the note-title lookup matched the sidebar's Trash entry, which wears the
same emoji as a note row.
56 checks across five suites, all passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
76 lines of commentary for five settings was more wall than help. The
file now says what to set; the reasoning behind the data directory, and
the two ways of putting it under /root, live in the readme where there is
room for them.
Also brought the deployment section up to date: it still told people to
export secrets by hand and run docker-compose, with no word about the
first admin, which is now the step that decides whether you can log in at
all.
INKNOTE_DATA_DIR stays commented out — one .env serves both compose
files, so setting it would drag local development off ./data too.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
It sat in backend/ while Compose reads .env from the repository root, so
the "cp .env.example .env" in the compose header pointed at nothing.
It also documented four settings that Compose never forwarded to the
container: ALLOWED_ORIGINS and the three version-retention knobs would
have been set in .env and silently done nothing. They are passed through
now, unset meaning the server's own defaults. Checked both directions:
every variable Compose reads is documented, and nothing documented is
ignored.
Dropped PORT from the example — the bundled nginx proxies to 4000 by
name, so changing it could only break that. Added the data-directory and
uid/gid settings, which were read but undocumented.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This is a private instance, so anyone able to reach the login page could
previously give themselves an account. The registration route is gone
rather than hidden, and the login screen no longer hints that accounts
can be made.
Accounts now come from an admin under Account → Administration: create,
delete, and reset a password. Appointing further admins is deliberately
not offered — with one admin it is not needed, and it is the one power
that turns a compromised account into a lost instance.
The first admin comes from INKNOTE_ADMIN_USER / INKNOTE_ADMIN_PASSWORD,
used only when the database has no users, or to choose whom to promote
when an older database has users but no admin. Once an admin exists both
are ignored, so leaving them in .env cannot reset anything.
Two things that would otherwise have been quietly wrong:
- a deleted user's token stayed valid until it expired, because tokens
are signed rather than stored and there was no session to revoke.
authMiddleware now checks the account still exists, so an open tab
stops working the moment the account is deleted.
- deleting an account takes its notes, notebooks, drawings and version
history with it via ON DELETE CASCADE. Verified: no orphaned rows in
notes, notebooks, sync_log, attachments or note_versions.
Deletion asks for the username to be typed back, since it destroys data
that version history cannot bring back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The app is meant to run in daily private use now, so this pass was mostly
about the ways it could quietly lose data.
Reliability and security:
- the server no longer invents a JWT_SECRET or ENCRYPTION_KEY when one is
missing; it refuses to start. The old fallback silently made every stored
note unreadable after a restart.
- notes are encrypted with AES-256-GCM (v2:); existing CBC bodies still read.
- login is rate limited and compares against a dummy hash when the user does
not exist, so timing does not reveal who is registered.
- a server response issued before a local save is never adopted. This had
already eaten drawing strokes and note links; sync.hasPendingWrites() now
guards every path that takes a body from the server.
Editor and features:
- TipTap replaces the contenteditable editor: tables, task lists, and links
to other notes and notebooks, with a backlinks bar on the target.
- content format v2 ({v:2,doc}); v1 {html,tasks} bodies migrate on open.
- version history: the state before each write is snapshotted, coalesced
into 5-minute windows, 50 versions or 90 days per note.
- full-text search runs in the client, because the server cannot read
encrypted bodies and a server index would defeat the encryption.
- image attachments are stored by SHA-256 and deduplicated; the client
fetches them authenticated and caches the blob, so they work offline.
- drawings are vector strokes in a fixed 1200x1600 page space and now look
the same on every screen (0.0-0.2% deviation across four widths).
- login is by username; existing email accounts migrate automatically.
Operations:
- data lives on host bind mounts, not Docker volumes, so Proxmox Backup
covers it. Back up .env with it — without ENCRYPTION_KEY the dump is
unreadable.
Structure:
- NoteApp.jsx is gone. App.jsx now holds only where the user is; note data,
search, layout, history and drag each live behind a hook, and the four
panes are stateless.
- the whole data layer is TypeScript, with 81 unit tests concentrated on
the places that have actually broken.
- fixed along the way: the browser back button had a dead press, because
restoring a history entry pushed a duplicate one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Honey