# Hoarder

A self-hostable bookmarking app with a touch of AI for the data hoarders out there.

- 🔗 Bookmark links.
- ⬇️ Automatic fetching for link titles, descriptions and images.
- ✨ AI-based (aka chatgpt) automatic tagging.
- 🔖 Chrome plugin for quick bookmarking.
- 📱 iOS shortcut for bookmarking content from the phone. A minimal mobile app might come later.
- 💾 Self-hostable first.
- [Planned] Archiving the content for offline reading.
- [Planned] Full text search of all the content stored.
- [Planned] Store raw notes and images.

**⚠️ This app is under heavy development and it's far from stable.**

## Installation

Docker is the recommended way for deploying the app. A docker compose file is provided.

Run `docker compose up` then head to `http://localhost:3000` to access the app.

> NOTE: You'll need to set the env variable `OPENAI_API_KEY` without your own openai key for automatic tagging to work. Check the next section for config details.

## Configuration

The app is configured with env variables.

| Name           | Default   | Description                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       |
| -------------- | --------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| OPENAI_API_KEY | Not set   | The OpenAI key used for automatic tagging. If not set, automatic tagging won't be enabled. The app currently uses `gpt-3.5-turbo-0125` which is [extremely cheap](https://openai.com/pricing). You'll be able to bookmark 1000+ for less than $1. |
| DATABASE_FILE  | Not set   | The path for the sqlite database.                                                                                                                                                                                                                 |
| REDIS_HOST     | localhost | The address of redis used by background jobs                                                                                                                                                                                                      |
| REDIS_POST     | 6379      | The port of redis used by background jobs                                                                                                                                                                                                         |

## Stack

- [NextJS](https://nextjs.org/) for the web app. Using app router.
- [Prisma](https://www.prisma.io/) for the database and its migrations.
- [NextAuth](https://next-auth.js.org) for authentication.
- [tRPC](https://trpc.io) for client->server communication.
- [Puppeteer](https://pptr.dev/) for crawling the bookmarks.
- [OpenAI](https://openai.com/) because AI is so hot right now.
- [BullMQ](https://bullmq.io) for scheduling the background jobs.

## Why did I build it?

I browse reddit, twitter and hackernews a lot from my phone. I frequently find interesting stuff (articles, tools, etc) that I'd like to bookmark and read later when I'm in front of a laptop. Typical read-it-later apps usecase. Initially, I was using [Pocket](getpocket.com) for that. Then I got into self-hosting and I wanted to self-host this usecase. I used [memos](https://github.com/usememos/memos) for those quick notes and I loved it but it was lacking some features that I found important for that usecase such as link previews and automatic tagging (more on that in the next section).

I'm a systems engineer in my day job (and have been for the past 7 years). I didn't want to get too detached from the web development world. I decided to build this app as a way to keep my hand dirty with web development, and at the same time, build something that I care about and will use everyday.

## Why not X?

- [Pocket](getpocket.com): Pocket is what hooked me into the whole idea of read-it-later apps. I used it [a lot](https://blog.mbassem.com/2019/01/27/favorite-articles-2018/). However, I recently got into home-labbing and became obsessed with the idea of running my services in my home server. Hoarder is meant to be a self-hosting first app.
- [Omnivore](https://omnivore.app/): Omnivore is pretty cool open source read-it-later app. Unfortunately, it's heavily dependent on google cloud infra which makes self-hosting it quite hard. They published a [blog post](https://docs.omnivore.app/self-hosting/self-hosting.html) on how to run a minimal omnivore but it was lacking a lot of stuff. Self-hosting doesn't really seem to be a high priority for them, and that's something I care about, so I decided to build an alternative.
- [Instapaper](https://www.instapaper.com/): Not open source and not self-hostable.
- [memos](https://github.com/usememos/memos): I love memos. I have it running on my home server and it's one of my most used self-hosted apps. I, however, don't like the fact that it doesn't preview the content of the links I dump there and to be honest, it doesn't have to because that's not what it was designed for. It's just that I dump a lot of links there and I'd have loved if I'd be able to figure which link is that by just looking at my timeline. Also, given the variety of things I dump there, I'd have loved if it does some sort of automatic tagging for what I save there. This is exactly the usecase that I'm trying to tackle with Hoarder.
- [Wallabag](https://wallabag.it): Wallabag is a well-established open source read-it-later app written in php and I think it's the common recommendation on reddit for such apps. To be honest, I didn't give it a real shot, and the UI just felt a bit dated for my liking. Honestly, it's probably much more stable and feature complete than this app, but where's the fun in that?
- [Shiori](https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori): Shiori is meant to be an open source pocket clone written in Go. It ticks all the marks but doesn't have my super sophisticated AI-based tagging. (JK, I only found about it after I decided to build my own app, so here we are 🤷).

## Development

- `yarn install` in the root of the repo.
- `yarn prisma:migrate:dev` then `yarn prisma:generate` to generate prisma's data and run the database migrations.
- `yarn web` to start the web app.
  - Access it over `http://localhost:3000`.
- `yarn workers` to start the crawler and the openai worker.
  - You'll need to have redis running at `localhost:5379` (configurable with env variables).
  - An easy way to get redis running is by using docker `docker run -p 5379:5379 redis`.
  - You can run the web app without the workers, but link fetching and automatic tagging won't work.

### Codebase structure

- `packages/db`: Where prisma's schema lives. Shared between packages.
- `packages/shared`: Shared utilities and code between the workers and the web app.
- `packages/web`: Where the nextjs based web app lives.
- `packages/workers`: Where the background job workers (crawler and openai as of now) run.