InkNote/readme.md

✏️ InkNote

A self-hosted note-taking application with rich text editing, freehand drawing, full-text search and encrypted sync — inspired by Samsung Notes.

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Features

Core

• Rich Text Notes — Bold, italic, underline, headings, bullet/numbered lists, task lists, quotes, code blocks
• Tables — Insert, resize columns, add/remove rows and columns, merge cells, toggle header row
• Note Links — Type @ to link to another note or notebook; every note shows what links back to it
• Version History — Past states of every note, restorable; restoring is itself reversible
• Full-Text Search — Searches note bodies, not just titles, and works offline
• Image Attachments — Pasted images are stored as deduplicated blobs, not inlined into the note
• Freehand Drawing — Pen, highlighter, eraser with adjustable thickness and color palette (20 colors, 7 pen sizes)
• Undo/Redo — Full history stack for drawing operations
• Notebooks & Folders — Create notebooks with custom gradient covers, organize notes by folder
• Star/Favorite — Quick access to important notes
• PDF Reading — Import a PDF and read it in the app; the file is cached so it stays readable offline
• Export — Any note, notebook or the whole account as Markdown or PDF, entirely in the browser
• Dark & Light Mode — Full theme support with refined color schemes

Sync & Storage

• Offline-First — Works fully offline, syncs when connection returns
• Conflict-Aware Sync — A write from a device that missed another's changes keeps the state it replaces as a version, rather than burying it
• WebSocket Real-Time Push — Changes appear on other devices instantly
• Encrypted at Rest — AES-256-GCM for note content and uploaded files on the server
• JWT Authentication — Username + password accounts with bcrypt password hashing. No public sign-up: an administrator creates the accounts
• Vector Drawings — Strokes are stored as vectors in one canonical page space, so a drawing looks identical on every screen and stays sharp at any pixel density

Architecture

• Self-Hosted Backend — Node.js + Express + SQLite (or PostgreSQL)
• Docker Ready — docker-compose up and you're running
• Client Sync Engine — Portable JS library for any frontend (React Native, Flutter JS bridge, Electron, web)

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Project Structure

inknote/
├── docker-compose.yml        # Deploy from the Gitea registry
├── docker-compose.dev.yml    # Build from source for local work
├── .env.example              # Copy to .env — Compose reads it from here
├── build.sh                  # Build & push images to Gitea
├── backend/
│   ├── server.js             # Express API + WebSocket server
│   ├── sync-client.js        # Client-side sync engine library
│   ├── package.json          # Node dependencies
│   └── Dockerfile            # Server container
├── frontend/
│   ├── src/
│   │   ├── App.jsx           # Root: where the user is, which dialog is open
│   │   ├── types.ts          # Shapes shared by server, IndexedDB and UI
│   │   ├── syncEngine.ts     # Offline-first sync + API client
│   │   ├── offlineStore.ts   # IndexedDB wrapper
│   │   ├── search.ts         # Local full-text index
│   │   ├── hooks/            # Note data, search, layout, history, drag
│   │   ├── export/           # Markdown, ZIP and print-to-PDF
│   │   ├── ui/               # Sidebar, dialogs, icons, palette
│   │   ├── features/notes/   # List, editor pane, version history
│   │   ├── features/notebooks/ # Dashboard
│   │   ├── features/drawing/ # Canonical stroke model + render layer
│   │   └── editor/           # TipTap schema, toolbar, note links, attachments
│   ├── public/sw.js          # PWA service worker
│   ├── nginx.conf            # Static serving + API/WS proxy
│   └── dockerfile            # Web container
├── e2e/                      # Browser suites — run with ./e2e/run.sh
└── readme.md                 # This file

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Quick Start

Where the data lives

Both compose files use bind mounts, not named volumes, so everything sits in a plain directory on the Docker host and is picked up by whatever backs that host up:

$INKNOTE_DATA_DIR/
├── db/        # inknote.db — notes, drawings, version history
└── uploads/   # image attachments, legacy raster drawings

Default is ./data for development and /srv/inknote in production; override with INKNOTE_DATA_DIR. It is a default, not an extra path — set it and the default location is never touched.

Create the directory before the first start. Docker will happily create a missing bind-mount source itself, but it creates it as root:root, and the container runs as uid 1000 and then cannot write:

mkdir -p /srv/inknote/{db,uploads} && chown -R 1000:1000 /srv/inknote

The path has to start with / or ./. Anything else Docker reads as the name of a named volume, and a name containing a slash fails outright.

Keeping it under /root

/root is mode 0700, so uid 1000 cannot pass through it — the server fails to write no matter who owns the directory underneath. Two ways out:

# A) let uid 1000 traverse /root, without making it readable
mkdir -p /root/inknote/{db,uploads}
chown -R 1000:1000 /root/inknote
chmod o+x /root                    # traverse only — `ls /root` is still refused
# .env:  INKNOTE_DATA_DIR=/root/inknote

# B) run the container as root instead — no chown, no chmod, but a break-out
#    lands on root rather than on an unprivileged user
# .env:  INKNOTE_DATA_DIR=/root/inknote
#        INKNOTE_UID=0
#        INKNOTE_GID=0

A is the better trade: it keeps the unprivileged container, which is the layer that matters if the app is ever exploited. Neither is needed under /srv or /opt, which is why those are the default.

Back up the .env holding ENCRYPTION_KEY too. Note content is encrypted at rest, so a copy of the database without that key cannot be read.

1. Local development (Docker)

# Generate secrets once
printf 'JWT_SECRET=%s\nENCRYPTION_KEY=%s\n' "$(openssl rand -base64 32)" "$(openssl rand -hex 32)" > .env

# Build and run backend + nginx-served frontend
docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up -d --build      # → http://localhost:3000

# Same, plus a Vite dev server with hot reload
docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml --profile dev up -d --build   # → http://localhost:5173

docker-compose.dev.yml builds from source and uses its own volumes, so it never touches production data.

2. Docker Deployment

mkdir -p /srv/inknote/{db,uploads} && chown -R 1000:1000 /srv/inknote
cp .env.example .env                       # then fill it in, see below
docker login gitea.honeyy.duckdns.org
docker compose pull && docker compose up -d
docker compose logs inknote-server | head  # says which account became admin

.env needs JWT_SECRET, ENCRYPTION_KEY and — on a fresh install — INKNOTE_ADMIN_USER plus INKNOTE_ADMIN_PASSWORD, since there is no sign-up to create the first account with. On an install that already has accounts, INKNOTE_ADMIN_USER alone decides which of them is promoted; without it the oldest one is, which is rarely the one you meant.

The web UI listens on port 3000, the API only inside the compose network. If a reverse proxy sits in front, bind the port to localhost ("127.0.0.1:3000:80"), otherwise the app is reachable on the host's address without TLS.

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API Reference

Authentication

Method	Endpoint	Body	Response
POST	/api/auth/login	{username, password}	{token, user}
GET	/api/auth/me	—	{id, username, displayName, isAdmin}
PUT	/api/auth/username	{newUsername, password}	updated user
PUT	/api/auth/password	{currentPassword, newPassword}	{success}

There is no registration endpoint. This is a private instance: accounts are created by an administrator, and nothing on the login screen suggests otherwise.

Usernames are 3–32 characters of letters, digits, ., _ or -, and match case-insensitively. Servers created before this carried e-mail logins; on first start they migrate automatically, deriving each username from the local part of the address (logged to the console).

Administration

Method	Endpoint	Body	Response
GET	/api/admin/users	—	user list with note counts
POST	/api/admin/users	{username, password, displayName}	created user
PUT	/api/admin/users/:id/password	{newPassword}	{success}
DELETE	/api/admin/users/:id	—	{success}

All four require an account flagged is_admin; the server checks this itself, so hiding the menu entry is presentation, not access control. An admin may not delete their own account.

Where the first admin comes from. INKNOTE_ADMIN_USER and INKNOTE_ADMIN_PASSWORD in .env:

Database state	What happens at start
no users at all	the account is created from both values
users, but no admin	INKNOTE_ADMIN_USER picks which one is promoted; without it, the oldest
an admin exists	both are ignored

So the variables can never reset an existing password or take rights away — on a running instance the worst they can do is nothing. Set INKNOTE_ADMIN_USER before upgrading an older installation if the oldest account is not the one that should hold the keys.

Deleting an account destroys its notes, notebooks, drawings and version history through ON DELETE CASCADE; the files behind attachments are collected by the hourly orphan sweep. The deleted person's session stops working immediately: tokens are signed rather than stored, so authMiddleware checks on every request that the account still exists.

Notebooks

Method	Endpoint	Description
GET	/api/notebooks	List all notebooks
POST	/api/notebooks	Create notebook
PUT	/api/notebooks/:id	Update notebook
DELETE	/api/notebooks/:id	Soft-delete notebook

Notes

Method	Endpoint	Description
GET	/api/notes	List all notes (metadata)
GET	/api/notes/:id	Get note with decrypted content
POST	/api/notes	Create note
PUT	/api/notes/:id	Update note ({content, links})
GET	/api/notes/:id/backlinks	Notes linking to this one
GET	/api/links	Every link, for backlink counts
DELETE	/api/notes/:id	Soft-delete note
PUT	/api/notes/:id/drawing	Save vector strokes

Sync

Method	Endpoint	Description

WebSocket

Connect to ws://localhost:4000/ws, then send:

{"type": "auth", "token": "JWT_TOKEN", "deviceId": "device-123"}

Receive real-time events: note_created, note_updated, note_deleted, notebook_created, etc.

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Sync Engine (Client)

import { SyncEngine } from './sync-client';

const sync = new SyncEngine('https://your-server.com', 'device-abc');

// Authenticate
await sync.authenticate('username', 'password');

// Listen for events
sync.on('status', (status) => console.log('Sync:', status));
sync.on('conflict', (conflict) => {
  // Present both versions to user, let them choose
  console.log('Conflict:', conflict);
});
sync.on('remote_change', (change) => {
  // Update local state with remote changes
  console.log('Remote change:', change);
});

// Start syncing (every 30s + WebSocket push)
sync.start();

// CRUD operations auto-queue for sync
await sync.createNote({ type: 'text', title: 'Hello', content: '<p>World</p>' });
await sync.updateNote('note-id', { title: 'Updated' });
await sync.deleteNote('note-id');
await sync.uploadPDF(fileBlob);
await sync.saveDrawing('note-id', strokeDoc);

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Working on the frontend

npm run test        # Vitest — store, search and content migration
npm run typecheck   # tsc --noEmit
npm run format      # Prettier
npm run build       # production bundle

TypeScript is enabled with allowJs, so .js and .ts coexist and modules can be converted one at a time. The whole data layer is typed — types, offlineStore, search, editor/content and syncEngine — because that is where the bugs have been: every serious one so far has been a shape bug, or a failure distinguished by comparing an error's .message to a magic string. Failures now carry a typed SyncError.code; .message still holds the same string, so the remaining JavaScript callers are unaffected.

The 81 unit tests concentrate on the same places, and several exist because the bug they cover actually happened:

• a queue entry that fails must stay queued, with an attempt counter
• fullSync must not drop notes created offline
• hasPendingWrites must cover the debounce window, not just requests in flight
• v1 note bodies must migrate without losing task state or smuggling in markup

Browser suites

The unit tests cover the data layer; these drive a real browser against a real server, because the failures that hurt most in this app were never visible in a unit test — a stale response overwriting fresh strokes, a note link surviving in memory but not through a reload.

docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up -d --build   # must be running
./e2e/run.sh                    # all suites
./e2e/run.sh editor drawing     # only these

Suite	Checks	What it holds down
admin	15	no sign-up anywhere; /api/admin/* refused for non-admins even when called directly
editor	17	tables and their right-click menu, task lists, note links, backlinks — and that each survives a reload
search-attachments	12	body-only matches, ranking, umlauts; images as blob URLs, not inline bytes
history	10	a large deletion is snapshotted, restoring works, restoring is itself undoable
drawing	7	strokes survive the poller, and match across four viewport widths
pdf	10	import, page proportions, lazy loading, and reading with the network off
conflict	10	a late write wins but the state it buries survives as a version
export	21	the downloaded bytes are real Markdown, ZIP and PNG, unpacked and read back

Each suite creates a throwaway account through the admin API and deletes it afterwards, so runs leave the database as they found it. They need an admin to do that with — marc/geheim123 by default, override with INKNOTE_ADMIN and INKNOTE_ADMIN_PASS.

Screenshots land in e2e/shots/, which is worth a look when a check fails.

How the frontend is arranged

App.jsx holds only where the user is — the open notebook, the open note, the search box, whichever dialog is up — and hands each of the three panes what it needs. Everything else lives behind a hook:

Hook	Owns
useNoteData	notes, notebooks, bodies, every mutation, background sync
useSearchIndex	the local index and the background backfill that fills it
useResponsive	phone vs desktop, sidebar and which pane a phone shows
useNavigationHistory	mapping the current location onto browser history
useNotebookDnd	drag-to-reorder, shared by sidebar and dashboard
usePwaInstall	the browser's install offer

useNoteData deliberately has no confirmation prompts in it: whether to ask before deleting something is a question for the interface, not the store. The panes (Sidebar, Dashboard, NoteList, EditorPane) take props and hold no state of their own, so they can be read on their own.

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Note Content

The body of a note is a TipTap/ProseMirror document stored as JSON:

{ "v": 2, "doc": { "type": "doc", "content": [ … ] } }

Tables, task lists and note links are real nodes rather than HTML that happened to survive document.execCommand. Notes written before this were { html, tasks }; they are converted to a document the first time they are opened and rewritten in the new format on the next save, so nothing needs migrating up front.

Note links and backlinks

Typing @ opens a search over notes and notebooks and inserts a noteLink node holding the target's id — so a link survives the target being renamed, and the label is refreshed from the current title whenever the note is opened.

The server cannot read encrypted note bodies, so it cannot discover links itself. The client sends the ids it references alongside the content, and the server maintains a note_links index from them. That index is what powers GET /api/notes/:id/backlinks and the "Linked from N notes" bar under the editor.

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Full-Text Search

Search runs entirely on the client. The server stores note bodies encrypted and deliberately keeps no plaintext index, so it cannot search them — and a server-side index would undo the point of encrypting at rest.

Bodies are normally fetched only when a note is opened, which would leave a fresh device with nothing to search. After login a background pass backfills the missing ones into IndexedDB, slowly enough to stay out of the way, indexing each as it lands. Searching therefore also works offline.

Matching is AND across terms, case- and diacritic-insensitive (kuhlschrank finds Kühlschrank), with title matches ranked above body matches. Results show a snippet around the first match.

Bodies of notes edited on another device are refreshed when that note is opened, so search results for untouched notes can lag behind until then.

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Reading PDFs

An imported PDF becomes a note of type pdf and is shown by a viewer instead of the text editor. Pages are laid out at their true proportions before anything is drawn, so the scrollbar is honest from the first frame; a document mixing portrait and landscape keeps both, rather than stretching the narrow pages.

Only pages near the viewport are rendered, and each keeps its own canvas — a PDF page is expensive to draw and cheap to hold, so scrolling back up repaints nothing. Canvases are sized in device pixels and scaled down by CSS, which is what keeps text sharp on a high-density screen.

pdf.js is not in the main bundle. It is larger than the rest of the application put together, so it sits behind a dynamic import: a session that never opens a PDF never downloads it. The worker is bundled too, not fetched from a CDN — a viewer that stops working during someone else's outage is not one you can rely on offline.

The legacy pdf.js build is used deliberately. Version 6 calls Uint8Array.prototype.toHex, which only very recent browsers have; anything older fails to parse the document with a message that says nothing about why.

Bytes are read through the authenticated attachment route and cached in IndexedDB, so a document opened once stays readable with no connection. Because storage is content-addressed, a cached copy can never go stale.

nginx needs a MIME type for .mjs — without one it serves the worker as application/octet-stream and the browser refuses to run it as a module.

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PDF storage

An imported PDF is stored as an attachment: encrypted, named by the hash of its contents, and shared by any note holding the same file. The note points at it through notes.pdf_attachment_id.

It goes up as a raw body rather than the base64 JSON images use — a scanned book runs to tens of megabytes and base64 would add a third to that for nothing. The bytes are checked for the %PDF- signature before anything is stored, so the declared content type is never taken on trust.

Images and PDFs are limited separately, because a 25 MB picture is nearly always a mistake while a 25 MB document is not: INKNOTE_MAX_IMAGE_MB (25) and INKNOTE_MAX_PDF_MB (200). The limits are there so a runaway upload cannot fill the disk, not to ration anything.

An earlier POST /api/notes/pdf stored a filesystem path in the note, which is why it never survived a container rebuild. That route is gone.

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Encryption at rest

Note bodies and uploaded files are both encrypted with AES-256-GCM under ENCRYPTION_KEY. Losing that key loses the notes — back it up with the database, not next to it.

Files carry an 8-byte INKENC01 header, so a file says for itself whether it is encrypted. That is what lets the startup sweep run on every boot and encrypt only what is still in the clear: files are shared between users by content hash, so a flag on a database row could not have answered the question.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• Deduplication still works. Files are named by the hash of the plaintext, so two identical uploads share one copy — encrypting each with a fresh IV would otherwise produce two different files from the same picture.
• Reads are not streamed. GCM only proves a file is intact once the final block is in, so an attachment is read whole and verified before anything is sent. Half of a corrupt image is worse than an error.

Uploads are written to a temporary name and renamed into place. A rename is atomic on one filesystem, so a crash mid-write leaves the old file or the new one, never a half-written one that would fail its tag forever after.

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Attachments

Images used to be inlined into the note body as base64 data URIs — a few screenshots turned one note into megabytes that were re-encrypted and re-uploaded on every keystroke. They are now separate blobs; the body only keeps an id.

• Stored on disk under the SHA-256 of their bytes, so the same image pasted into ten notes is kept once
• Uploads are type-checked against the actual bytes, not the declared MIME type
• Downloads require the owner's token, so <img> cannot fetch them directly — the client fetches with its token, caches the blob in IndexedDB and renders a blob URL, which also makes images work offline
• Files with no database row are swept up daily, one hour after last write

Method	Endpoint	Description
POST	/api/attachments/pdf	raw PDF body, ?filename=
POST	/api/attachments	Upload a base64 data URL
GET	/api/attachments/:id	Fetch the bytes (owner only)

Removing an image from a note does not yet delete its blob: the body is encrypted, so the server cannot tell what is still referenced. Unused blobs cost disk space, nothing else.

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Version History

Every write snapshots the state it is about to replace into note_versions, encrypted the same way the note itself is.

Saves arrive about once a second while typing, so snapshots coalesce: within a 5-minute window the existing newest version already represents "before this editing session". Two cases bypass the window, because they are exactly the ones worth undoing:

• a write that shrinks a note to under half its size (large-deletion)
• clearing a drawing (drawing-cleared)

Restoring snapshots the current state first (before-restore), so picking the wrong version is not a one-way door. A restored body also rebuilds its entries in the backlink index.

Retention — the newest 50 versions per note, trimmed on every write, plus a daily sweep of anything older than 90 days. Both are configurable:

Variable	Default	Meaning
MAX_VERSIONS_PER_NOTE	50	Versions kept per note
VERSION_RETENTION_DAYS	90	Age after which a version is dropped
VERSION_COALESCE_MINUTES	5	Window in which saves share one snapshot

Deleting a note — moving one to the trash keeps its history, because the note can still be restored. Deleting it permanently, or emptying the trash, removes its versions along with it (ON DELETE CASCADE), leaving no orphaned rows behind.

Method	Endpoint	Description
GET	/api/notes/:id/versions	List (metadata only)
GET	/api/notes/:id/versions/:versionId	One version, decrypted
POST	/api/notes/:id/versions/:versionId/restore	Restore it

Version history protects against overwritten data. It does not protect against a lost disk, because it lives in the same database — that is what backing up the data directory is for.

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Export

Notes should not be hostage to this program, so everything can leave it — from a single note up to every note in the account, reachable from the note's toolbar, a notebook's context menu, and Account → Alle Notizen exportieren.

A single note is asked two questions rather than one, because the answers are not independent — Markdown holds text only, a PNG holds the drawing only, and PDF is the one format that holds both:

Was soll mit?	In welcher Form?
Notiz mit Zeichnung	PDF (Markdown puts the drawing in a PNG beside it)
Nur den Notiztext	PDF · Markdown
Nur die Zeichnung	PNG · PDF

A note without a drawing skips the first question instead of showing it with two thirds greyed out.

Markdown keeps the notes editable elsewhere. Headings, lists, quotes, code, tables and task state all have equivalents and are carried over; a link to another exported note becomes a relative link to its file, and a link to a note outside the export degrades to its plain title rather than a dead reference. A note with images or a drawing arrives as a ZIP so the files travel with it, and a whole notebook gets a README.md index grouped by notebook.

PDF goes through the browser's own print dialog rather than a bundled PDF library — every browser already has a good one behind Save as PDF, and it handles fonts and page breaks better than anything that would fit in here. This is the format that keeps drawings inside the document.

Two things Markdown cannot represent, and what happens instead:

drawings	rendered to PNG beside the note, with a line in the text saying so
underline	written as <u>, which every Markdown renderer passes through

The ZIP writer is export/zip.ts — about eighty lines for stored (uncompressed) entries, rather than a dependency. Note text is small and images are already compressed, so there was nothing to gain by compressing, and this is one fewer thing to keep updated.

Everything runs in the browser. Nothing is uploaded anywhere to produce a file.

---

Drawings

Drawings are vector strokes, not bitmaps. Every stroke is recorded in one canonical page space of 1200 × 1600 units:

{ "v": 1, "w": 1200, "h": 1600, "strokes": [
  { "t": "pen", "c": "#e94560", "s": 5.5, "p": [100,100, 200,180, 300,140] }
]}

t is the tool (pen | highlighter | eraser), c the colour, s the width in canonical units, and p a flat x,y point list. Each viewer scales that page to the room it has and rasterizes at its own device pixel ratio, which is what makes a note look the same on a phone and on a desktop — and stay crisp on both. Stroke data is encrypted at rest like note content.

Notes drawn before this format still carry a PNG in drawing_data_path; it renders underneath any newer strokes so nothing is lost.

---

Conflict Resolution

Two devices can edit the same note without knowing about each other — a phone that was offline all day, a laptop that was not. When the phone reconnects, its save arrives last, and without care it would simply bury the newer work.

Each write carries baseUpdatedAt: the revision the editing device had when it started. The server compares it with the note's current revision:

1. Same — an ordinary save, nothing to think about.
2. Server is newer — someone else saved in between. The incoming edit still wins, because rejecting it would throw away whatever was just typed, and on a phone that has been offline for a day that is the worse loss. But the state it replaces is kept as a version marked conflict, so both exist, and the history dialog is where you pick which one to keep.

This replaced vector clocks, which sat in the server unused: no client ever sent one. They can tell a genuine conflict from a device merely catching up, which is strictly more accurate — but that accuracy only pays for itself with a merge interface to spend it on, and comparing revisions needs one field and reuses the version history that already exists.

What this does not do: it will not tell you at the moment it happens. The conflicting version appears in the history, labelled, and that is where you find it. A notification is worth adding if it ever actually bites.

---

Extending to Native Platforms

React Native

Use note-app.jsx components with React Native adaptations (replace HTML canvas with react-native-canvas or @shopify/react-native-skia for drawing). The sync engine works as-is.

Flutter

Use the sync engine via a JavaScript bridge, or port the API calls to Dart. For drawing, use Flutter's CustomPainter.

Electron

Wrap the React app directly in Electron for desktop. Add native file system access for export.

---

Security Notes

• All note content is encrypted with AES-256-CBC before database storage
• Passwords are hashed with bcrypt (12 rounds)
• JWT tokens expire after 30 days
• HTTPS should be enforced in production (use a reverse proxy like Nginx or Pangolin)
• The encryption key should be stored securely (e.g., environment variable, secrets manager)

---

Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Frontend	React 18 + Vite
Editor	TipTap (ProseMirror)
Backend	Node.js, Express
Database	SQLite (dev), PostgreSQL (prod)
Real-time	WebSocket (ws library)
Auth	JWT + bcrypt
Encryption	AES-256-CBC
Container	Docker + docker-compose