Inkly

Inkly is a personal document library you run locally: a single web app to collect pages, sort them into folders, search them, and read them in the browser.

Built with Rust (axum), Tantivy for search, and a React + Tailwind SPA.

What you can do

• Sign in with the username and password you configure for the server. After login, the browser remembers your session for later visits.
• Browse the library using the sidebar: folders and document titles reflect how you organized content (paths and tags).
• Add documents from the “new document” flow: paste text, upload a file, or point at a URL, plus optional title, folder path, tags, and private notes.
• Search full text from the header: optional filters include limiting results to the current folder, setting a result cap, and narrowing by tags (comma-separated in search settings).
• Open a document to read it: HTML content is shown in a safe reading view; other content is rendered as rich text where appropriate.
• Edit or delete a document from its page when you need to fix metadata or retire a clipping.

Your data (index and stored files) lives under the directory set by DATA_DIR in .env (see .env.example).

Optional automatic summarization of indexed content can be turned on in .env with SUMMARIZE_ENABLED; see comments in .env.example for build and runtime notes.

Prerequisites

• Rust toolchain (Cargo)
• Node.js (for frontend dev, or for the automatic production build step)

Run the app

1. Environment
   Copy .env.example to .env and set at least USERNAME and PASSWORD (these are what you type on the login page). Adjust HOST if the default bind address or port should change (.env.example uses 127.0.0.1:15173; if you omit HOST, the server falls back to 127.0.0.1:8080).

2. Start the server
   From the repo root:

   cargo run -p inkly

3. Open the app
   In your browser, go to the address in HOST (or http://127.0.0.1:8080 if you did not set HOST).

Single binary: the backend embeds the built frontend at compile time, so one process serves the UI and the backend. During cargo build / cargo run, Cargo normally runs npm run build in frontend/ unless you disable that.

• To skip rebuilding the frontend on each backend build: SKIP_FRONTEND_BUILD=1.

Develop the frontend with hot reload

When you want to edit UI code with Vite’s dev server instead of embedding the production bundle:

1. cd frontend && npm install
2. Keep the backend running (cargo run -p inkly).
3. In another terminal: npm run dev

The dev server proxies API routes to the backend URL from this repo’s .env (HOST), so the SPA can use same-origin URLs while both processes run.

Login and accounts

Signing in uses the same username and password as in your .env. Today the server is configured for one user; that username also scopes your documents and search so they stay private to that account.