jorgebay / ruby-server

A production-ready implementation of the Standard File protocol | https://standardnotes.org

Standard Notes Server, Ruby Implementation

This is a production-ready reference implementation of the Standard Notes protocol.

Standard Notes is a secure personal notes/simple blogging system.

A production client is available at https://app.neeto.io.

The Standard Notes protocol allows any client or server to communicate with one other and manage a user's notes as long as they speak the same language. Anyone can run a SN server or client.

What is Standard Notes?

Standard Notes is a simple personal notes application with a strong focus on privacy and encryption. Notes are encrypted locally before being transmitted over the wire with a key only the user knows, and then encrypted once more server-side with a key only the server knows.

SN also allows you to create URLs for groups of notes. This means you can create a group called 'blog' and make the notes in this group publicly viewable at yourdomain.com/blog.

You can also share individual notes and customize the URL, i.e if you wrote about finding secure and private Evernote alternatives, you can share it at yourdomain.com/why-i-switched-from-evernote.

All this happens automatically and with very little effort from you.

The Neeto Client

The Neeto app is a production client that conforms to the Standard Notes protocol. For details about the Neeto client, or for instructions on running your own client, see the Neeto web client repo.

Running your own server

You can run your own Standard Notes server, and use it with any SN compatible client. This allows you to have 100% control of your data. This server implementation is built with Ruby on Rails and can be deployed in minutes.

Getting started

Requirements

• Ruby 2.2+
• Rails 5
• MySQL database

Instructions

1. Clone the project:

   git clone https://github.com/standardnotes/ruby-server.git
   

2. Create a .env file in the project's root directory. Add environment variables (see Environment variables for full listing):

   DB_HOST=localhost
   ...
   

3. Initialize project:

   bundle install
   rails db:migrate
   

4. Start the server:

   rails s
   

Deploying to a live server

You can find instructions on deploying an SN server from scratch here:

Deploying a Standard Notes server with Amazon EC2 and Nginx

Environment variables

NOTE_CONTENT_EK

A 256 bit key for encrypting a note's content.

Digest::SHA256.hexdigest(SecureRandom.random_bytes(32))

DB_HOST

Database host.

DB_PORT

Database port. 3306 is standard.

DB_DATABASE

Database name.

DB_USERNAME

Database username.

DB_PASSWORD

Database password.

Contributing

Contributions are encouraged and welcome. Currently outstanding items:

• Test suite

License

Licensed under the GPLv3: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html