A self-hosted, open-source alternative to Obsidian, with publishing built in.

Astrolabe is a Markdown notes app that runs on your own server. It opens a folder of plain files, including an existing Obsidian vault, and you reach it from any browser, the desktop app or the Android app. Notes you mark as public become a blog on the same server. Compared with Obsidian:

• Publishing is built in: publish: true puts a note on your blog, with RSS, reader comments and scheduled posts. No Publish subscription.
• No sync service: the server holds the vault, every device opens the same notes, and history is backed up to a git remote you own.
• A web app: your notes from any device with a browser, at home or behind your own domain, plus desktop (Linux, Windows) and Android apps.
• Your vault as it is: wikilinks, embeds, callouts, properties, highlights and footnotes are read as Obsidian writes them, and the folder keeps working in Obsidian.
• Open source under the MIT license.

git clone https://github.com/ZahakJ/astrolabe.git && cd astrolabe && npm install && npm start

Features

Writing

• Live-preview editor. Markdown renders as you type and the source comes back under the caret; wikilinks with autocomplete, backlinks, embeds, callouts, tables you edit in place, footnotes and vim keys.
• Graph and outline. A graph of the vault coloured by folder or tag, a local graph per note, and an outline you can drag to reorder sections.
• Search with operators (tag:, path:, before:) that ignores accents and diacritics, so cafe finds café; search and replace across the vault with a preview and undo.
• Math and LaTeX. KaTeX in any note, and whole .tex files edited, linked and published like Markdown.
• Focus. Word goals from a note's properties, typewriter scrolling, and zen mode.
• A writing desk. The essays and series you mean to write, on a board from idea to published, each with its angle, its sources and its words over time. Plain notes underneath, and private until you publish.
• Right-to-left text. Arabic, Persian and Hebrew render and edit natively beside English, line by line, with their diacritics; the interface is also available in Arabic.
• Templates and daily notes, with {{date}} fields, plus drawings in the Excalidraw format.

Reading and study

• Book reader for PDF and EPUB. Highlights and citations go straight into the note beside the book.
• Read aloud in English, French, Arabic and Japanese, with voices that run on your own machine.
• Trackers, sigils and orbits. Trackers follow the books and courses you are working through, sigils mark daily habits, and orbits is spaced repetition over cards kept in your notes, with Anki import.
• Ask the vault. Search your notes by meaning and get cited answers, from a local model through Ollama or from Anthropic if you choose it.

Publishing

• Selective publishing. publish: true puts a note on your site and a date in its place schedules it. Everything else stays private, and <!-- comments --> inside a published note never reach a reader.
• Blog mode with topics, series, RSS, reader comments and webmentions, or a homepage you compose from sections in the designer.
• A library of books and courses built from folders of notes, read in order.

Everywhere

• Desktop app for Linux (AppImage, deb, pacman) and Windows, and an Android app that can also work on a vault kept in a private GitHub repository.
• Offline. The web app installs as a PWA and keeps the notes you have opened readable without a connection.
• Backup and history in a git remote you own.
• Import from Obsidian, Notion and Evernote.
• No telemetry. No analytics, no CDN requests, no account.

Running it

Astrolabe needs Node 24 or later. After npm start, open http://localhost:6801. The first run creates ./vault with starter notes that double as a short manual.

To use a folder of notes you already have:

ASTROLABE_VAULT=~/notes npm start

To publish, set an admin password with npm run hash-password, put the hash and a SESSION_SECRET in .env, add publish: true to the notes you want public, and serve the app behind an HTTPS reverse proxy. See Publishing and access.

The desktop and Android builds are on the latest release.

Documentation

• The manual, in English and Arabic, with its source in docs/
• How it compares with Obsidian, Logseq and Joplin
• Configuration: every .env key and setting
• Development and CONTRIBUTING.md

License

MIT