Simple Bookmark

A linkding inspired, self-hosted, bookmark manager built with my Essentials framework that only requires .NET 8.0, an SQL database, and a C compiler.

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Intro

Simple Bookmark (name pending) is a fast, portable, and secure, self-hosted bookmark manager that was inspired by the Linkding project.

Simple Bookmark was built using my Essentials web framework which enables high performance web applications and back-end extensibility in a small package. While it comes preconfigured with SQLite by default, I have 1st party support for MySQL and SQLServer, through add-on packages. It supports memory, Redis, or VNCache session for data caching.

Features

Light/Dark theme
TOTP and public-key authentication
HTML bookmark file import from Linkding and others
HTML, JSON, and CSV bookmark export
Bookmark quick-add for browsers
Invite users with share links
Supports (and tested) SQLite, SQLServer, MySQL/MariaDB databases
It's quick <300ms load time & under 150kB with compression
It's small, 139mb Docker image
Argon2Id password hashing with secure defaults
Supports downstream proxy servers
Built-in TLS (TLS is required)

Deployment overview

You need to read the quick-start guide to fully configure Simple-Bookmark but here are the basic steps.

Simple-bookmark was built without Docker as the primary target, this is because I believe users should have the support to deploy open source apps easily outside of a container. So while a Docker deployment is an option, the container is actually built from the Linux-x64 package during CI build time.

Container install

Download the latest alpine build package: sb-alpine3.19-oci.tgz

This archive contains all the software needed to build the image locally. It also comes with a docker-compose.yaml file for easy setup and deployment. Here is the gist:

tar -xzf sb-alpine3.19-oci.tgz
docker build . -t vnuge/simple-bookmark
docker-compose up -d

Of course there is more setup involved, so take a look at the docs for more info

The image should be about 139mb when built! I'm also hoping to get it down even smaller in the future. You may also use Podman in the same format, simply substitute the word docker for podman in the previous commands.

Bare-metal install

Download the latest archive for your operating system here

Linux overview

Install Task, CMake, GCC (or your favorite libc toolchain) and dotnet-runtime-8.0 (non-ASP)
Build the native libraries with the included script: cd lib/ && sh ./setup.sh
Configure the server by opening the config.json file in the working directory
Set required environment variables (read documentation)
Run the server with: dotnet webserver/VNLib.WebServer.dll --config config.json

Windows overview

Install the .NET Runtime (non-ASP) package and make sure the command dotnet is valid
Your native dependencies should already have been built for you and included in your package, you just need to find the DLL file paths to add to your system environment variables.
Set required environment variables (read documentation)
Run the server with: webserver/VNLib.WebServer.exe --config config.json

Links & Support

Package downloads - Archives, checksums, signatures, and module source code
Documentation - quick-start guides, user guides and more (work in progress)

Compatibility Notes

Simple-Bookmark uses far more aggressive input sensitization than Linkding and others. I am still working out a happy medium on aggressive safety and usability. When importing bookmarks, you may consider selecting the fix errors checkbox that will attempt to correct your HTML file import by replacing illegal characters with white-space.

License

The software in this repository is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (or any later version). See the LICENSE files for more information.

Contact

Head over to my website for my contact info/community.

Other open source notices

This project was initially built in about a week using Flowbite. I really tried to push myself with a new front-end application from scratch using a new component library. I will slowly clean up the repeated tailwindcss utilities to make classes more unified throughout the app, but it's low priority. So big shout out to the Flowbite project and their free components and svg icons.

This project was also heavily inspired by the Linkding project which I used for years until I wanted to escape the Docker container and add some new features and speed it up! Thanks for the awesome inspiration!

Finally of course VueJS, Vite, Tailwindcss, Postcss, VueUse, HeadlessUI, and many other FOSS projects made this possible!