Setting up Notea with Minio

In this tutorial we’ll be setting up Notea (https://cinwell.com/notea/) with Minio (https://github.com/minio/minio) for it’s storage, since the former requires a S3 compatible storage, I started with this guide over at CyberHost https://cyberhost.uk/notea/ and changed it to my liking while updating certain bits that have changed since.

Docker Compose

We’ll use docker-compose, to install it head to https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/, to orchestrate the two services, so let’s create a folder for our project and create a docker-compose.yaml file:

mkdir notea && cd notea && touch docker-compose.yaml

Now with your favorite editor add the following and replace the <values> with the correct information:

version: '3'
services:
    notea:
      image: cinwell/notea
      container_name: notea
      environment:
        - STORE_ACCESS_KEY=<minio-user>
        - STORE_SECRET_KEY=<minio-password>
        - STORE_BUCKET=notea
        - STORE_END_POINT=https://<minio.your.domain>
        - STORE_FORCE_PATH_STYLE=true
        - PASSWORD=<notea-password>
        - COOKIE_SECURE=true
        - BASE_URL=https://<notea.your.domain>
      ports:
        - "3000:3000"
    notea-s3:
      image: minio/minio
      container_name: notea-s3
      environment:
        MINIO_ROOT_USER: <minio-user>
        MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD: <minio-password>
      ports:
        - "9000:9000"
      volumes:
        - /data/notea:/data
      entrypoint: sh
      command: -c 'mkdir -p /data/notea && /usr/bin/minio server /data'

If you don’t care where the data (the notes) lives within your host, for backing up reasons, you could use a docker named volume:

     notea-s3:
            ...
      volumes:
        - notea-volume:/data
      ...

Then we build up the containers and start them -detached (in the background):

docker-compose up -d

We can check that everything is nominal by:

docker-compose ps

And if you want to check the logs of one of the containers you can:

docker-compose logs <container_name>

If you want to stop them you can do so with:

docker-compose stop

And if you want to start from scratch you can do:

docker-compose down

Nginx (Reverse Proxy)

Now we need to tell our server to return our notea and minio instance when it receives a request to certain url, for this task I use nginx , to install it head to https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/tutorials/install/, with your favorite editor open /etc/nginx/sites-available/your.domain (depending of your distro, this folder might not exist and it’s /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/your.domain for more https://stackoverflow.com/a/17415606/1987581 ) and add:

server {
    server_name <notea.your.domain>;
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://0.0.0.0:3000;
    }

}

server {
    # Change to your URL, has to match the one in `docker-compose.yaml`
    server_name <minio.your.domain>;

    # Settings from: https://docs.min.io/docs/setup-nginx-proxy-with-minio.html

    # To allow special characters in headers
    ignore_invalid_headers off;

    # Allow any size file to be uploaded.
    # Set to a value such as 1000m;
    # to restrict file size to a specific value
    client_max_body_size 0;

    # To disable buffering
    proxy_buffering off;

    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;

        proxy_connect_timeout 300;
        # Default is HTTP/1, keepalive is only enabled in HTTP/1.1
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Connection "";
        chunked_transfer_encoding off;
        proxy_pass http://0.0.0.0:9000;
    }

}


server {
    server_name <minio.your.domain>;
    listen 80;

}

server {
    server_name <notea.your.domain>;
    listen 80;

}

Let’s test our config with:

nginx -t

We now make sure we got SSL certificate ( https ) for our site with the handy certbot utility, to install it head to https://certbot.eff.org/instructions :

certbot --nginx

Follow the instructions and enable it for both <notea.your.domain> and <minio.your.domain> and apply the redirections.

Now we need to restart the nginx service, in a systemd server:

systemctl restart nginx

I like to check the status after a restart to make sure everything is fine:

systemctl status nginx

Notea

Now when visiting <notea.your.domain> you should be greeted by a password input, use <notea-password> and you should now be good to go!

Updates

I normally subscribe to new releases on GitHub, https://github.com/QingWei-Li/notea, to know when to restart and get the latest version:

docker-compose stop

docker-compose pull

docker-compose up -d

Don’t forget that you can report bugs, suggest features and/or contribute.

That’s all, happy note taking!