Cherry Stem

Collaborative markdown-driven note-taking platform

Introduction

cherry-markdown is a popular browser-based markdown editing platform. Cherry Stem is a simple node app that delivers it as a service, permitting one to take notes that are persistent.

The backend is sqlite. Requests for different database backends will be ignored.

Quick Start

~$ git clone https://github.com/wikitopian/cherry-stem
~$ cd cherry-stem
~$ npm install
~$ npm run server

Deployment

Service Configuration

There is a dot.env.example file that's a template. You can copy its contents to .env and modify them for your environment.

Editor Configuration

There is a cherry.options.default.json file that's a template. You can copy its contents to cherry.options.json, where your edits won't conflict with git.

These are the options for the Cherry Markdown editor. Please refer to that separate project's documentation for configuration options.

Nginx

Here's an example of an nginx reverse proxy configuration that successfully handles the websocket.

map $http_upgrade $connection_upgrade {
	default upgrade;
	'' close;
}

server {
	listen 80;
	server_name notes.example.com;
 
	rewrite ^/(.*)$ https://notes.example.com/$1 permanent;
}

server {
	listen 443 ssl;
	server_name notes.example.com;

	ssl_certificate         ssl/example.com.pem;
	ssl_certificate_key     ssl/example.com.key;

	location ~ \.ws$ {
		proxy_http_version 1.1;
		proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
		proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;
		proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;
	}

	location / {
		proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000/;
	}
}

Contributions

While an effort will be made to support and improve upon this service, and pull requests will be reviewed and considered, this project is a personal one to solve a personal problem. The reason I had to do this was that CodiMD doesn't work on ARM64 architecture because it has too many dependencies, one of which doesn't work on ARM64.

To Do

• File uploading
• Differential refreshing (bit-sync?)
• Line-level locking for collaboration
• Optional password access/editing
• Preview mode if no password and not hidden
• Server-side refresh rate enforcement