Learn how to – How to setup Personal knowledge base on Ubuntu 18.04 with Trilium Notes

Learn how to – How to setup Personal knowledge base on Ubuntu 18.04 with Trilium Notes.

Are you interested in building your personal knowledge base on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS server?. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the process of installing and configuring Trilium Notes to power your Personal knowledge base on Ubuntu 18.04.

Trilium Notes is an open source hierarchical note taking application which focuses on building large personal knowledge bases. It has compelling features available in commercial notes taking applications.

How to Install Trilium Notes on Ubuntu 18.04

Trilium is provided as either desktop application (Linux, Windows, Mac) or web application hosted on your server (Linux). We will consider both ways of running Trilium Notes on Ubuntu 18.04.

Running Trilium Notes on Desktop

To run Trilium Notes application on your Desktop, download binary release for your platform from latest release. Save the release version to VERvariable.

sudo apt -y install wget
export VER="0.27.3"
wget https://github.com/zadam/trilium/releases/download/v${VER}/trilium-linux-x64-${VER}.7z

Install p7zip-full package which provides 7z command used to extract the file.

sudo apt install p7zip-full

Then extract downloaded file.

$ 7z x  trilium-linux-x64-${VER}.7z
 7-Zip [64] 16.02 : Copyright (c) 1999-2016 Igor Pavlov : 2016-05-21
 p7zip Version 16.02 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,64 bits,1 CPU Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8250U CPU @ 1.60GHz (806EA),ASM,AES-NI)
 Scanning the drive for archives:
 1 file, 65591626 bytes (63 MiB)
 Extracting archive: trilium-linux-x64-0.27.3.7z
 Path = trilium-linux-x64-0.27.3.7z
 Type = 7z
 Physical Size = 65591626
 Headers Size = 116429
 Method = LZMA2:24 BCJ
 Solid = +
 Blocks = 2
 Everything is Ok                                                               
 Folders: 2035
 Files: 11193
 Size:       258648218
 Compressed: 65591626

Change your working directory to created folder and run the trilium

cd trilium-linux-x64/
./trilium

Directory contents screenshot:

Since this is a Desktop installation, select “I’m a new user and I want to create new Trilium document for my notes” on the initial screen shown after the application launch.

The last thing is to choose username and password used for logging into the application.

Click “Finish Setup” to finish the installation. You should be presented with Trilium notes taking panel where you can start work.

Running Trilium Notes on Server

You can choose to install Trilium on a server. The advantage of this is that you’ll be able to setup sync and have an online version of Trilium which you can access from any machine or smartphone.

Install Node.js 10.x

Install Node.js 10.x on Ubuntu 18.04 using the guide in the link below,

Installing Node.js 10 LTS on Ubuntu 18.04 / 16.04 / Debian 9

$ node --version
 v10.15.0

Install required dependencies:

sudo  apt install -y git autoconf libpng16-16

Clone Trilium git repository from stable branch

git clone -b stable https://github.com/zadam/trilium.git

Download all node dependencies

cd trilium
npm install

Run Trilium Server

cd trilium
nohup node src/www &

Using nohup keeps trilium running after user logs out. Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:8080 to access Trilium.

Replace “localhost” with your hostname or IP address. Login with your session credentials.