The diary grows into a workspace: a flat list of dated entries becomes a
tree of spaces, and the app is renamed to match what it now is.
Spaces and nodes
One recursive `nodes` table replaces `entries`: a space is a root node,
and folders and documents nest under it without limit. Entries keep
their ids through the migration, so share tokens, media links and the
drafts in localStorage all still resolve.
Folder import
A folder or a zip is uploaded as a document tree. Markdown becomes
documents titled from their first heading, everything else becomes
media, and relative links between the imported files are rewritten to
the paths they landed at, so a set of cross-linked notes stays
navigable after the upload.
Boards
A kanban board per space, with the space as the board: lists, cards,
due dates and an optional link to a document. `diary` has none.
Mail
SMTP notifications through an outbox. A mail is enqueued under a key
naming the occurrence it belongs to, so a restart cannot resend and a
relay that refuses is retried with a widening backoff. Four kinds: the
diary reminder, cards due and overdue, a weekly digest, and logins
from a browser that has not been seen before or a burst of failures.
All of it is dormant until WORKSPACE_SMTP_URL is set.
Rename
Everything user-visible says workspace; everything that already exists
outside this repo keeps its name, because renaming it would break a
running deployment for tidiness alone: the database file, the docker
volume, the session cookie, the Proton device, the keyring entry and
the localStorage keys. Configuration reads WORKSPACE_* first and falls
back to DIARY_*, so the deployed .env keeps working untouched.
The data directory is the whole diary, and until now keeping a copy of it
was someone's manual job. The server can now register itself in Proton
Drive as a device — its own sync root, next to the desktop clients — and
keep that folder equal to DIARY_DATA_DIR, encrypted client-side by the
same Rust SDK the Linux client uses.
One interactive `narl-diary proton-login`, then nothing prompts again.
The stored session carries the tokens, the mailbox password (the key
chain is rebuilt from it on every start) and the account key salts, which
have to be captured at login: `core/v4/keys/salts` needs the `locked`
scope, and only a password-login token has it. Refresh tokens are
single-use, so every rotation is written back before it can be needed.
It lives as a 0600 file next to the database, on the same volume as the
data it protects; `--features keyring` puts it in the OS keyring instead,
for hosts that have a Secret Service.
The mirror is one-way and change-driven: writes mark the diary dirty and
it is mirrored once the writing stops, with an interval as the backstop —
an hour of writing is one backup, not sixty. `diary.db` goes up as a
VACUUM INTO snapshot, so it is a real point in time rather than a file
copied out from under a writer, and as a new revision each time, so
Proton keeps the older ones. Uploads are immutable, so they are written
once and skipped by size afterwards. Deletions do not propagate unless
asked: a backup that forgets on command is one accident away from being
no backup at all.
Identification follows Proton's third-party rules — an honest
`external-drive-narl_diary@<version>-alpha`, the disclosure printed
before any credential is asked for, and remembered folder uids instead of
walking the tree every run.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01D5Gk8FPkRXu1e6Nj2BCRE1
There was no way to get everything out — only one entry at a time, by
hand. A diary you cannot leave is not a diary you can trust.
The archive is entries/ as one markdown file per entry named by its day,
media/ with every embedded file under its real name, and a README. Media
links are rewritten to relative paths, so the entries render in any
markdown reader with no help from this application. Names are restricted
to characters that need no escaping inside a markdown link.
It is built on the blocking pool into a temporary file and streamed, so a
diary with photographs in it never has to fit in memory.
Single-user diary served as one Rust binary with the Svelte frontend
embedded.
- axum 0.8 + SQLite (sqlx), migrations run at startup
- stateless HMAC session cookie; credentials from .env, compared in
constant time
- FTS5 full-text search, user input rewritten into quoted prefix terms
- media uploads linked to entries by scanning bodies for /api/media/<id>,
which scopes share-token media access and entry deletion
- unguessable share links (192-bit token) serving a public read-only page
- vim keybindings via CodeMirror plus a modal browse layer and : command
line; disabled on touch devices
nvrl
