It's Just Post-It

Just Post-It is a simple note-taking app aiming to provide a novel experience by allowing the user to just drop notes on a free canvas.

Changelog | Migration Guide v1 to v2

General notice

As this is a fork from a personal project presented here and detailed in this blog post, some basic features still need to be implemented before production use.

Storage Architecture

Just Post-It uses a file-based storage system:

• Notes are stored as .md files with frontmatter in the contents/ folder
• Categories are stored in contents/categories.json
• Preferences are stored in the browser's localStorage (client-side)

This approach makes your data:

• Easy to backup (just copy the contents/ folder)
• Version control friendly
• Human-readable and editable
• Portable across systems

Roadmap

Here are the planned features:

• Full description of all available features
• Full i18n support (translations, reading direction, …)
• Global export of post-it
• Improve app responsive
• Demo website based on the real app
• …?

This list is non-exhaustive and expected to evolve.

Dependencies & requirements

• npm
• node >= 18.18
• pm2

Installation

Once you installed npm, node and pm2, follow these instructions.

# Clone this repo on your server in the desired location
git clone https://github.com/Jean-Tinland/just-post-it

# Go to the cloned folder
cd ./just-post-it

# Install dependencies
npm install

Note

The contents/ folder will be automatically created when you start using the app. No database initialization is required.

Configuration

# Duplicate the .env example
cp .env.example .env

Fill in the required information inside your .env:

PROD_URL=https://your-production-url.com # the production url of your app
PORT=4000 # the port used by the app
JWT_SECRET=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx # the jwt secret, it can be anything like an UUID
JWT_DURATION=90 # the jwt token duration in days
PASSWORD=xxxxxxxx # your password

Just Post-It is now ready to run.

Launching the app

Still in the just-post-it folder:

# This will start the app in the background with pm2
npm run launch

You can use either Apache or nginx to setup Just Post-It and make it accessible from the web.

Tip

Once you launched just-post-it, pm2 will tell you that the process list is not saved. You can run pm2 save command in order to automaticaly restart all pm2 processes if your server is restarted.

Updating the app

# This will stop the app, pull the latest changes and relaunch it
npm run update

Warning

Your Just Post-It app will be down during the update.

Backup & Restore

Backing up your data

Simply copy the contents/ folder to back up all your notes and categories:

# Create a backup
cp -r contents/ contents-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d)/

Restoring from backup

Copy your backed-up contents/ folder back to the application directory:

# Restore from backup
cp -r contents-backup-20250204/ contents/

Tip

You can also use git to version control your contents/ folder by removing it from .gitignore, though this will make your notes public in your repository.