silverbullet/website/Server.md

Installing SilverBullet as a (local) web server is the most mature, and most flexible way to install SilverBullet. If mature and flexible is your thing, try this option!

The idea is simple: you run the web server (instructions below), point your browser at it and go, go, go! You can access the URL via your desktop browser, but also a mobile one. This makes it a great option to access your space from various devices without requiring any type of sync. You could even go full-on YOLO (that’s a technical term), and install it on a public cloud server somewhere and access it that way (be sure to at least enable authentication and put SSL on top of it, though).

Supported operating systems

• 64-bit Linux
• Intel or Apple Silicon macOS
• Windows is currently not supported, if there’s demand for it let us know. We recommend using Desktop on Windows instead.

You have two options to install and run SilverBullet as a server:

1. Installation right on your host system
2. Running it with Docker

Regular installation

Run the following in your terminal:

curl https://silverbullet.md/install.sh | sh

This will determine your operating system and download the appropriate silverbullet into your current folder. You will likely want to move it to a more convenient location in your PATH (made sure this is a place where it's writable for future upgrades.)

To run SilverBullet, create a folder for your pages (it can be empty, or be an existing folder with .md files) and run the following command in your terminal:

./silverbullet <pages-path>

By default, SilverBullet will bind to port 3000, to use a different port use the --port flag.

For security reasons, by default SilverBullet only allows connections via localhost (or 127.0.0.1). To also allow connections from the network, pass a --hostname 0.0.0.0 flag (0.0.0.0 for all connections, or insert a specific address to limit the host), ideally combined with --user username:password to add BasicAuth password protection.

Once downloaded and booted, SilverBullet will print out a URL to open SB in your browser.

Upgrading SilverBullet

SilverBullet is regularly updated. To get the latest and greatest, simply run:

./silverbullet upgrade

If all goes well, this will upgrade silverbullet in-place. After the upgrade, restart SilverBullet. You should be good to go.

Installing SilverBullet with Docker

There is a docker image on docker hub. To use it, first create a volume to keep your space (markdown) files:

docker volume create myspace

Then, run the container, e.g. as follows:

docker run -p 3000:3000 -v myspace:/space -d --name silverbullet zefhemel/silverbullet

If you'd like to pass in additional command line arguments (e.g. --user to add authentication) you can just append those to the command, e.g.:

docker run -p 3000:3000 -v myspace:/space -d --name silverbullet zefhemel/silverbullet --user me:letmein

To build your own version of the docker image, run ./scripts/build_docker.sh.

You can also use docker-compose if you prefer. From a silverbullet check-out run:

PORT=3000 docker-compose up

or similar.

To upgrade, simply pull the latest docker image (rebuilt and pushed after every commit to "main") and start the new container.

docker pull zefhemel/silverbullet

Docker images are also available based on version, have a look at the docker hub page.