Notes that outlive the app that made them.
A full Markdown workspace whose database is a GitHub repository you already own.
Linked notes, offline search, a visual diagram studio and real version history,
with nothing stored on our servers and nothing to be locked out of.
Open ForkLeaf ·
Try it without an account ·
Documentation ·
Discussions ·
Wiki ·
Changelog
Why ForkLeaf?
Most note apps ask you to trust them with your writing. ForkLeaf doesn't hold your
notes at all. Every note is a plain .md file in a GitHub repository you own.
| |
|---|
| 🗂 Storage | Your GitHub repository. Nothing is stored on our servers. |
| 🕰 History | Ordinary git commits. git log your notes, blame a paragraph. |
| ✈️ Offline | Everything is written to IndexedDB first, then pushed. |
| 📤 Export | PDF, HTML, Word, Markdown, plain text and JSON, all in the browser. |
| 🌐 Publishing | Public pages, books and digital gardens served by GitHub Pages. |
| 🔓 Lock-in | None. Clone the repository and every note is still there. |
Free, all of it, with no tiers. The expensive part of a notes app is storage,
and ForkLeaf has none.
Features
✍️ Write the way you like
Rich text, split source and preview, or raw Markdown, switchable per note.
Slash commands, a ⌘K command palette, a properties panel that edits YAML
frontmatter, and live stats and outline for every note.
🔗 Notes that link to each other
[[Wikilinks]] in the Obsidian dialect, with hover previews, backlinks quoted at
the line they were written on, and links to notes you haven't written yet.
Full-text search ranks every word of every note, offline.
📊 A real diagram studio
Mermaid diagrams drawn on a canvas or typed with autocomplete. A gallery of
14 templates, and node positions that survive the round trip between the
visual builder and the source.
And much more:
- 📄 Read PDFs beside your notes. Quote a passage and the citation records the sentence, not the page number.
- 🔄 Local-first sync. Rapid edits coalesce into one clean commit. Offline changes queue up, and conflicts are shown, never silently merged.
- 🕵️ History and review. Every version of every note, blame for prose, a timeline replay of how your notebook grew, and spaced reading.
- 🌿 Branches and pull requests. Write on any branch, or propose changes to a repository you can't push to.
- 🌍 Publish a note, a book or a digital garden to GitHub Pages, with backlinks and a link map.
- 🧩 Browser extension. Save pages, selections and highlights from anywhere on the web to your inbox.
- 🤖 AI assistants. A built-in MCP server lets Claude and other assistants search, read and write your notes as ordinary commits.
- 🎨 Themes, keyboard shortcuts for everything, and installable as an app on desktop.
See the full list on the features page or in features.md.
Getting started
Use it online
- Go to www.forkleaf.in and click Continue with GitHub.
- Pick an existing repository or let ForkLeaf create a private one for you.
- Start writing. Every change is saved to your repository as a commit.
You can also try it without an account:
notes stay in your browser until you connect GitHub.
Run it locally
Requirements: Node.js 20.9+ and pnpm 9+.
git clone https://github.com/praneeth132006/ForkLeaf.git
cd ForkLeaf
pnpm install
pnpm dev
Open http://localhost:3000/editor. With no configuration, ForkLeaf runs in
local mode: fully functional, with notes stored in your browser. This is also
how the test suite and CI exercise the app.
-
Go to GitHub → Settings → Developer settings → OAuth Apps → New OAuth App and set:
- Homepage URL:
http://localhost:3000
- Authorization callback URL:
http://localhost:3000/api/auth/callback
-
Copy the example environment file and fill in your app's values:
cp .env.example apps/web/.env.local
GITHUB_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID=your_client_id
GITHUB_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET=your_client_secret
SESSION_SECRET=generate_with_openssl_rand_base64_32
NEXT_PUBLIC_APP_URL=http://localhost:3000
-
Generate the session secret with openssl rand -base64 32, then restart pnpm dev.
ForkLeaf requests the repo scope because it writes to private repositories;
public_repo is offered on the sign-in page for anyone keeping notes in public
repositories only.
How it works
flowchart LR
You([You type]) --> Editor
Editor --> Store[(IndexedDB)]
Store --> Queue[Change queue]
Queue --> API[Next.js API route]
API --> GH[(Your GitHub repo)]
subgraph Browser
Editor
Store
Queue
end
Your GitHub token lives only on the server, encrypted into an httpOnly cookie. The
browser talks to /api/gh/*, never to GitHub directly, so no script on the page
can read your token. More in docs/architecture.md.
Repository layout
This is a pnpm + Turborepo monorepo.
| Package | Responsibility |
|---|
apps/web | Next.js app: auth, API routes, publishing, the editor shell and docs |
apps/extension | The "Save to ForkLeaf" browser extension |
@forkleaf/editor | React editing surfaces: rich text, source, split and the diagram studio |
@forkleaf/store | IndexedDB storage, change queue, sync engine, conflicts, search index |
@forkleaf/github-client | GitHub REST client: trees, files, atomic multi-file commits |
@forkleaf/markdown-engine | Frontmatter, parsing, sanitised rendering, wikilinks |
@forkleaf/diagrams | Mermaid rendering, templates, autocomplete, visual-builder graph model |
@forkleaf/exporter | Client-side PDF, HTML, DOCX, Markdown and ZIP export |
@forkleaf/pdf | PDF text extraction, in-document search, durable citations |
@forkleaf/mcp | MCP server for AI assistants |
@forkleaf/types | Shared domain model |
Development
pnpm dev # start the web app
pnpm test # run the test suite
pnpm typecheck # typecheck every package
pnpm lint # lint
pnpm build # production build
pnpm check # everything above, in order (run this before a pull request)
Community
- 💬 Discussions: questions, ideas and showing what you've built.
- 🐛 Issues: bug reports and feature requests.
- 📚 Wiki: guides, FAQ and recipes from the community.
- ✉️ Email: [email protected] for anything private. Replies sometimes land in spam, so check there if you haven't heard back.
Contributing
Contributions of every size are welcome, from a typo fix to a new feature. Read
CONTRIBUTING.md for setup, conventions and good first issues,
and please follow the Code of Conduct.
Found a security issue? Please don't open a public issue. See SECURITY.md.
If ForkLeaf is useful to you, a ⭐ on the repository helps other people find it.
License
Apache License 2.0 © ForkLeaf contributors.
