Cardi Notes is a new kind of note keeping tool -- with all data privately stored in your own AWS account, accessible on any device without maintaining your own server, completely open-source and free to use.
You can think of Cardi as Google Keep, but without the Google.
My goal in creating and open-sourcing Cardi is to make it as easy as possible to move personal note-keeping off of a third-party cloud and into a private data store to which only you have access.
The implementation is currently more technical than I'd like -- it requires a personal AWS account, where notes are stored in a private DynamoDB table and queried directly by a static frontend using AWS access keys like a username and password. However, I think it's unique at least, and the advantage of a self-hosted note application that's both maintenance-free and actually-free is undeniable.
You can read more about Cardi in the wiki.
In order to start using Cardi to keep notes, the process is short and simple:
- Make sure you've created a personal AWS account
- If you're not up for learning a bit about AWS, that's ok, but may want to try a different solution for now
- Follow along with the setup guide to create necessary AWS access keys
- These keys are only ever stored in your own browser and sent to AWS, never anywhere else
- Visit cardinotes.app and allow it to use the credentials you just created
- This will automatically create the necessary DynamoDB tables when you first log in
- Full markdown support in note content
- Assign a note to any number of "boards" (i.e. tags) for simple organization
- Ability to archive notes that are no longer relevant
- Automatic fetching of HTML titles and images for URL notes
- Quick filters based on board or date of note creation
- Support for batch archival and tag modification
- Works in all major browsers, and phones as a Progressive Web App
- Dark mode!
- Fully automated integration testing and deployment
- Statically generated site (see JAMStack for more info), hosted on Netlify
- Minimal bundle size, with no tracking or analytics
- All benefits of having data stored in a DynamoDB table, including:
- Point in Time Recovery available
- Fully encrypted at rest
- Easy export and restore of notes to JSON or CSV
- Easy direct administration when needed
Requires npm version 6.14 or greater to build
This project is mainly a single-page application, taking advantage of the fantastic open-source libraries Svelte to define and build the individual components, Tailwind for the styling, and Rollup.js as the build system and bundler. This is a pretty standard javascript setup, so you can use npm install to install dependencies for the project and npm run dev to start a local (live-reloading) server for real-time development.
To create a release-ready bundle for your own deployment of Cardi, run npm run build, which will compile all Svelte components to javascript, then render the JS bundle into public/build.
Actual releases to cardinotes.app are handled via a Github action, triggering whenever a commit to master is tagged, which builds the site and publishes the artifact to Netlify, which hosts the static site and handles SSL certs.
I'm happy to accept any new features or bug fixes to this repository, as long as they don't change the core functionality or requirements of Cardi (whole application is deployed as a static bundle, all application data is stored decentralized in a user's personal cloud account).
In order to contribute, the process should be much the same as for other Github repositories -- fork this repo, make your changes, push, then create a PR against this repo from your fork. I'm still actively working on this project, so I'll be sure to keep an eye on the PRs and get back to you soon!
All code in this repository, unless otherwise stated, is open source under the GNU GPLv3 license.