(m)ark(d)own (m)emory

Markdown Memory (mdm) is for those of us who love markdown as a way to capture our thoughts, our journals, our experiences, our memories, photos, knowledge, and everything and anything else, but also acknowledge that the act of reviewing and reflecting on that markdown is very different than capturing it.

mdm is a self-hosted application which you point at an Obsidian vault, and it will provide RESTful API access and a web application for viewing your notes. Nothing leaves your machine — mdm reads the vault directly off disk, and everything it stores itself (per-note read/done flags, a short-lived cache of resolved image URLs) lives in its own Redis instance.

mdm's core feature is fully configurable views, similar to Bases in Obsidian, with some power-ups to improve their interaction. A view is a name plus a set of folder/frontmatter/date filters, so the same vault can be sliced as many ways as you have use cases — no re-tagging notes, no schema to migrate. Point each view at whichever UI fits the content:

• an inbox-style review that surfaces notes one at a time and tracks what you've read,
• a sortable table with badge-annotated columns, or
• a gallery — grid, or grouped by month/year — for image-heavy notes like books, journals, or photos.

Wikilinks between notes resolve automatically (so a view can surface a note's linked notes too), and every note carries a deep link back into Obsidian, so you're never more than a click from editing the real thing.

The other feature currently included in mdm is habit tracking. This takes a simple frontmatter property in your notes and provides an interface for allowing you to track habits more effectively through your markdown. Each habit gets a running score with streak and consistency multipliers — bonuses for do-more habits, penalties for do-less ones — plus a full day-by-day history to plot and a breakdown of exactly which days and streaks moved the score.

Rounding it out, a stats page gives you aggregate counts across the vault (notes, folders, words, attachments) alongside a GitHub-style activity graph — one square per day, shaded by how much you wrote or edited, with outlier days called out.

See it in action in the demo: demo.markdownmemory.com

Running mdm against your own notes

mdm ships as a set of published Docker images, so you can run it against your own notes vault (any folder of .md/.markdown files, such as an Obsidian vault) without cloning this repo or installing Node. From any directory:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dannywieser/mdm/main/infra/docker/quickstart.sh | bash -s -- mdm

This downloads docker-compose.yml and an example config into ./mdm, prompts for the absolute path to your notes vault and saves it as NOTES_ROOT in .env — this is what gets mounted read-only into the containers, so it needs to point at your actual vault or the stack will start against an empty ./notes folder instead — and creates app.config.json from the example. If there's no terminal to prompt against (or you'd rather skip the prompt), set NOTES_ROOT yourself: curl ... | NOTES_ROOT=/absolute/path/to/vault bash -s -- mdm. Then:

1. Double-check mdm/.env has NOTES_ROOT set to the absolute path of your notes vault.
2. Edit mdm/app.config.json:
   • set obsidianVault — needed for links to open notes in Obsidian to work correctly.
   • update dateFormats to match how dates appear in your notes — this is key to mdm's date filtering.
   • see CONTRIBUTING.md for the full field list (views, habits, flags, etc.).
3. cd mdm && docker compose pull && docker compose up -d --no-build
4. Open http://localhost

To update to newer images later, re-run docker compose pull && docker compose up -d --no-build from that same directory.

Developing mdm

See CONTRIBUTING.md for running the apps from source, the full Docker Compose reference, and contribution guidelines.