📮 Briefkasten

Briefkasten (EN: Mailbox) - am Haus- oder Wohnungseingang angebrachter Behälter für die dem Empfänger zugestellten [Post]sendungen

Self-hosted bookmarking application. Works with any Prisma compatible database (MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, etc.)

Warning

Briefkasten v2 is currently available in beta at https://dev.briefkastenhq.com

After the beta period, the database will be dropped, so that we can migrate all existing data from the current (v1) briefkastenhq.com over to the new version. I'm working on the new docs already, but the v1 docs are of course still available. If you find any bugs, or otherwise want to help, you can contribute at ndom91/sveltekasten or ndom91/briefkasten-docs.

Free Instance: briefkastenhq.com [Docs]

📸 Screenshots

🎩 Features

• Save by Browser Extension
• Automatic title and description extraction
• Drag-and-drop URLs on page to save
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Organise by categories and tags
• Import and export bookmarks from standard HTML format
• Bookmark image fetching background job
• Multiple views
• Fulltext search
• REST API
• OAuth + Email magic link login

🧺 Prerequisites

To self-host this application, you'll need the following thins:

1. Server / hosting platform for a Next.js application (i.e. Vercel / Netlify)
2. For OAuth login, a developer account at any one of the providers supported by NextAuth.js
3. Database that works with Prisma (i.e. MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, etc.)
4. Image hosting space (i.e. Supabase / ImageKit / Cloudinary) (optional)

These are all relatively straight forward, other than the image hoster. This was chosen to avoid putting the images in the database. The example application at briefkastenhq.com is using Supabase Storage, but any other similar provider like Cloudinary or a simple S3 Bucket would also do the job. I chose Supabase, because they have an easy to use SDK, a decent free tier, and I was already using their Postgres service.

After you've got an account setup at all of the above providers, or have your own infrastructure ready to go, you can continue on to the next steps below.

🚀 Getting Started

1. Clone the repository

$ git clone git@github.com:ndom91/briefkasten.git && cd briefkasten

2. Install dependencies

$ pnpm install

3. Copy the .env.example file to .env, and open it with your favorite text editor to fill in your environment variables.

$ cp .env.example .env
$ vim .env

In this environment variables file, make sure to at least fill in the DATABASE_URL, NEXTAUTH_URL and NEXTAUTH_SECRET. The rest of the environment variables depend on the services / features you want to use. For example, Google/Github for OAuth login and/or Supabase for object storage.

4. Start the server!

// First time only
$ pnpm db:push

// dev
$ pnpm dev

// prod
$ pnpm build
$ pnpm start

🐳 Docker

You can also self-host Briefkasten with Docker. To do so, you must:

1. Install docker and docker-compose.
2. Clone the repository and copy the .env.example to .env file.
   1. Here you also need to fill out the DATABASE_URL and NEXTAUTH_* environment variables at minimum.
   2. The DATABASE_URL for the postgres container should be DATABASE_URL=postgres://bkAdmin:briefkasten@postgres:5432/briefkasten?sslmode=disable
3. Run docker-compose up -d in the root of the repository. This will start the application as well as the database for you.
4. After the initial start, you still have to manually seed the database. This is most easily done through the app container (bk-app).
   1. Run docker exec -it bk-app /bin/bash to enter a terminal session inside the container.
   2. Then run pnpm db:push inside the container. This will push the database schema from prisma to the configured database.
5. Now your application and database should be up and running at the default http://localhost:3000

More details can be found in the Docker section of the docs.

🕸 Related

📲 Save from Android Share Menu

With this open-source application HTTP Shortcuts, you can create a "Share Menu" item which executes a POST request with dynamic input, i.e. a web page's URL and title. This makes it super easy to share items from your phone to Briefkasten! More information in the docs.

🌍 Browser Extension

There is a companion browser extension in the works which you can use to add websites to your vault while browsing the web. It can be found at ndom91/briefkasten-extension and in the Chrome Extension Store. More details in that repository.

🧑‍🏭 Screenshot Job

There is also a background job to fill in bookmarks which do not have a valid image. It can be found in the ndom91/briefkasten-scrape repository. This job runs every 2 hours in a Github Action and processes 10 bookmarks at a time.

👷 Contributing

This project is open to any and all contributions! Please stick to the ESLint / Prettier settings and I'll be happy to take a look at your issue / PR 😀

📝 License

MIT