Write instantly. Save when you're ready. Chat with your knowledge base.
Notebase is a Laravel-based productivity tool that combines a no-login rich-text notepad with a personal knowledge workspace. Save notes to the cloud, organize them into notebooks, attach sources, and query your content through an AI chat interface with cited responses.
- Rich-text editor (Quill) with autosave — no sign-up required to start writing
- Save to cloud with one click once you're ready
- Namespaced note URLs:
/n/{slug} - Optional password protection on any note (hashed at rest)
- Owner-aware edit permissions with read-only fallback for visitors
- Create notebooks with visibility controls:
private,unlisted,public - Share-token links for unlisted and public notebooks
- Attach sources to notebooks — existing notes, uploaded files (
pdf,doc,docx), or URLs - Manage sources with status filtering (
pending,processing,ready,failed) and retry support
- Background ingestion jobs with status tracking
- URL extraction with HTML cleanup
- File extraction with format-specific strategies
- Extracted text persisted for retrieval
- Notebook-scoped semantic RAG retrieval
- Chat UI with full conversation history and memory summarization
- Cited assistant responses linked to source chunks
- Token usage tracking per conversation
- OpenAI-backed generation and embeddings when configured; deterministic local fallback otherwise
- Social login only — Google and GitHub OAuth via Laravel Socialite
- No passwords, no email verification, no registration forms
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Backend | PHP 8.2+, Laravel 12 |
| Frontend | Bootstrap 4.6.2, jQuery 3.7.1, Quill 2.0.3 |
| Auth | Laravel Socialite (Google, GitHub) |
| AI / Embeddings | OpenAI API (optional) |
| Queue | Laravel Queue (database driver recommended) |
| Database | MySQL / PostgreSQL / SQLite |
composer install
npm install && npm run dev
cp .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate
php artisan migrateAPP_URL=http://localhost:8000
# Database
DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_DATABASE=notebase
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=
# Queue (required for source ingestion)
QUEUE_CONNECTION=database
# Social Auth — Google
GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID=
GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET=
GOOGLE_REDIRECT_URI="${APP_URL}/callback/google"
# Social Auth — GitHub
GITHUB_CLIENT_ID=
GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET=
GITHUB_REDIRECT_URI="${APP_URL}/callback/github"
# AI — optional, local fallback used when absent
OPENAI_API_KEY=
OPENAI_EMBEDDING_MODEL=text-embedding-3-small
OPENAI_CHAT_MODEL=gpt-4o-mini# Web server
php artisan serve
# Background worker — required for source ingestion
php artisan queue:workIf the jobs table is missing:
php artisan queue:table && php artisan migrate
Fine-tune retrieval behaviour in .env:
RAG_MIN_RETRIEVAL_SCORE=0.08
RAG_SEMANTIC_WEIGHT=0.75
RAG_KEYWORD_WEIGHT=0.25
RAG_RECENT_MESSAGES_WINDOW=6
RAG_SUMMARY_CHAR_LIMIT=1200vendor/bin/phpunitUseful route checks:
php artisan route:list --path=n
php artisan route:list --path=notebooks
php artisan route:list --path=chatFull technical documentation — architecture, data model, ingestion pipeline internals, chat flow, route map, security model, and roadmap:
MIT