~/diary

A private, terminal-themed diary that runs in the browser. One user, one SQLite file, one binary.

• Rust + axum backend, SQLite storage, Svelte 5 frontend.
• Markdown entries with full-text search (SQLite FTS5).
• Drag, drop or paste images, video and audio straight into an entry.
• Share any entry behind an unguessable link — revocable at any time.
• Backs itself up to Proton Drive, end-to-end encrypted, as a registered device.
• Real vim keybindings on the desktop (CodeMirror 6 + vim mode), plain taps on mobile.
• The whole frontend is embedded in the release binary, so deploying is copying one file.

Quick start

cp .env.example .env      # set DIARY_USER, DIARY_PASSWORD and DIARY_SECRET
make build                # builds the frontend, then the release binary
./target/release/narl-diary

Then open http://127.0.0.1:4242.

DIARY_SECRET signs the session cookie; generate one with openssl rand -base64 32. Changing it logs every device out. The database and uploads live under DIARY_DATA_DIR (./data by default) — that directory is the entire backup, and it is exactly what the Proton Drive mirror copies.

Development

make dev-api   # cargo run, serving the API on :4242
make dev-web   # vite dev server on :4243, proxying /api to :4242

In debug builds the binary reads web/dist from disk, so cargo run alone also works once the frontend has been built at least once.

Keys

The desktop UI is modal. In the browse pane:

key	action
j / k	move down / up
gg / G	first / last entry
Enter, l	open the highlighted entry
o	new entry, straight into insert mode
i, a	edit the open entry
Esc, h, q	back out to the list
/	full-text search (n clears it)
s / y	toggle sharing / copy the share link
x, dd	delete the entry
:	command line
Ctrl-S	save from anywhere
?	help

Inside the editor the full vim keymap is live — w/b, dd, ciw, visual mode, macros, :w to write. :help lists every ex command; the useful ones are :w, :wq, :q!, :new [yyyy-mm-dd], :date, :title, :share, :link, :upload, :media, :search, :backup, :set theme=mocha|green|amber|ice and :set novim.

On a touch device modal editing is turned off and the same actions are buttons.

Not losing things

Every change is written to localStorage as it is typed and to the server a couple of seconds after typing stops, so :w is a habit rather than a necessity. If a tab dies mid-entry, opening that entry again restores the draft and says so — :e! throws it away, the way vim handles a swap file.

:export downloads the open entry as markdown. :export! downloads the whole diary as a zip: one markdown file per entry named by its day, every embedded file under its real name, and relative links between the two, so the archive reads in any markdown viewer without this application.

Backing up to Proton Drive

The server can mirror itself into Proton Drive, where it appears as a device — its own sync root, alongside the desktop clients — rather than as a folder dropped in My Files. Everything is encrypted client-side before it leaves the machine, by the same Rust SDK the Linux client uses, so Proton stores a diary it cannot read.

It is a third-party client: it identifies itself to Proton as external-drive-narl_diary@<version>-alpha and says so before it asks for account details. It carries no Proton branding and is not supported by Proton.

Set it up once, interactively, because SRP and 2FA need a human:

narl-diary proton-login                       # or, in Docker:
docker compose exec -it diary narl-diary proton-login

That stores a session — tokens, the mailbox password needed to rebuild the key chain, and the account key salts — as a 0600 file next to the database. It sits on the same volume as the diary it protects, and it is enough to read the account, so the volume is the thing to keep private. Built with --features keyring on a host that has a Secret Service, the session goes to the OS keyring instead and the file is only a fallback; the container has no session bus, so there it is always the file.

Afterwards the server resumes on its own and nothing prompts again. Refresh tokens are single-use, so every rotation is written back immediately — which is also why two servers must not share one session file.

The mirror is one-way and change-driven: a write marks the diary dirty, and once it has been quiet for DIARY_BACKUP_DEBOUNCE_SEC the mirror runs, with DIARY_BACKUP_INTERVAL_MIN as a backstop. An hour of writing is one backup, not sixty. The device folder ends up as a copy of the data directory:

narl-diary/          the device — Proton allows only folders in a device root
  data/              the diary's data directory, copied
    RESTORE.txt      what this is, and how to put it back
    diary.db         a VACUUM INTO snapshot — consistent, no write-ahead log
    uploads/<uuid>   every uploaded file, under the name the database knows

diary.db becomes a new revision each time, so Proton Drive keeps the older ones and a mistake that was mirrored can still be undone. Uploads are written once and never rewritten. Restoring is copying the contents of data/ back into an empty data directory — no tool in between, which is the point.

command	what it does
narl-diary proton-login	log in and enable backups
narl-diary proton-status	account, device, schedule, how much is mirrored
narl-diary backup-now	mirror once and exit — for cron, or for nerves
narl-diary proton-logout	forget the session; the mirror stays where it is

From inside the diary, :backup says when the last one finished and :backup! runs one now. A failed backup is loud: it is reported by :backup, and the next tick retries it.

Deleting an entry does not delete it from the mirror unless DIARY_BACKUP_PRUNE is on. A backup that forgets on command is one accident away from being no backup at all.

Sharing

:share mints a 192-bit random token and copies https://your-host/s/<token>. That page needs no session, renders the entry read-only, and serves only the media files that entry currently embeds — dropping a picture out of a shared entry immediately makes it unreachable through the link. :unshare destroys the token, and a new :share mints a different one.

API

Everything except the two share routes requires the session cookie.

method	path	purpose
POST	/api/login, /api/logout	session
GET	/api/me	current user
GET/POST	/api/entries	list (?q= searches) / create
GET/PUT/DELETE	/api/entries/{id}	read / update / delete
GET	/api/export	every entry and file, as a zip
GET/POST	/api/backup	Proton Drive mirror: status / run now
POST/DELETE	/api/entries/{id}/share	mint / revoke a share token
GET/POST	/api/media	list / upload (multipart)
GET/DELETE	/api/media/{id}	serve / delete a file
GET	/api/share/{token}	public: read a shared entry
GET	/api/share/{token}/media/{id}	public: media inside a shared entry

Deploying

Put a TLS-terminating reverse proxy in front of it, point it at DIARY_BIND, and set DIARY_SECURE_COOKIE=1. Nothing else is needed: no database server, no runtime dependencies, no build tools on the host.

The app sends its own Content-Security-Policy, Referrer-Policy: no-referrer, X-Content-Type-Options and X-Frame-Options; a proxy that adds its own should not weaken them. no-referrer matters in particular, because a share token lives in the URL and would otherwise leak to any site a shared entry links to. Uploaded files are only ever served as types that cannot execute — anything else is handed back as an opaque download.

Docker

cp .env.example .env   # set DIARY_USER, DIARY_PASSWORD, DIARY_SECRET
docker compose up -d --build

The image builds the frontend with bun and the binary with cargo, then ships only the binary on debian:trixie-slim (~86 MB), running as an unprivileged user. DIARY_BIND and DIARY_DATA_DIR are forced in compose.yml, so the values in .env do not have to change; everything else is read from .env. Database and uploads live in the diary-data volume and survive recreation.

By default the port is published on 127.0.0.1:4242 only. To serve it through traefik instead, copy compose.override.yml.example to compose.override.yml and adjust the host — it joins the external narl network, drops the published port, and routes to container port 4242. Set DIARY_SECURE_COOKIE=1 in .env once it is served over HTTPS.