ForkLeaf

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

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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

1. Go to www.forkleaf.in and click Continue with GitHub.
2. Pick an existing repository or let ForkLeaf create a private one for you.
3. 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.

1. 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

2. 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
   

3. 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.