Minimalist Web Notepad — Developers Mod

A single-page PHP notepad. Forked from pereorga/minimalist-web-notepad to add a few features useful to developers.

What this fork adds

• CLI POST path. curl --data-binary @- to /<id> writes the raw request body to the note, no form field required.
• Append mode. curl --data-binary @- to /<id>/append appends instead of overwriting.
• Output mode routing. Append /{mode} to a note URL to get the stored content in a specific format:
  • plain — text/plain, raw text
  • base64 — text/plain, base64-encoded
  • md5 — text/plain, MD5 hash
  • mtime — text/plain, last-modified timestamp
  • html / css / js / json — same content with the matching Content-Type header, so the note can be embedded as a web source
• curl auto-raw. Any request with a curl user-agent gets the raw stored content with no HTML wrapper, even without a mode query.

The 1-second autosave in the web UI is unchanged from upstream.

Quick examples

# Upload a file's contents from the CLI
dmesg | curl --data-binary @- https://example.com/dmesg

# Append more output
dmesg | tail -100 | curl --data-binary @- https://example.com/dmesg/append

# Read it back (curl UA → auto-raw, no /plain needed)
curl https://example.com/dmesg

# Or be explicit
curl https://example.com/dmesg/plain
curl https://example.com/dmesg/base64
curl https://example.com/dmesg/md5
curl https://example.com/dmesg/mtime

# Embed the note as a CSS file (Content-Type: text/css)
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://example.com/site.css/css">

Note IDs are 5 chars drawn from 234579abcdefghjkmnpqrstwxyz (no ambiguous characters).

Installation

This app is served from the site root. Redirects and the favicon use absolute paths (/<id>, /favicon.ico). For subpath deployments, front it with a reverse proxy that rewrites the path, or add a <base href> shim to the HTML.

The web server must be able to write to the _tmp directory — that is the only persistence layer.

PHP 7.4+ is fine. The whole app is a single index.php; CSS and JS are inlined into it.

Apache

Enable mod_rewrite and let .htaccess take effect. The shipped .htaccess rewrites ^/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/?([a-z0-9]*)?$ to index.php?note=$1&mode=$2 and disables directory indexes.

For basic auth, uncomment the bottom block of .htaccess and point AuthUserFile at your htpasswd file.

Nginx

If the project is in the document root:

location / {
    rewrite ^/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/?([a-z0-9]*)?$ /index.php?note=$1&mode=$2 last;
}

If it lives in a subdirectory:

location ~* ^/notes/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/?([a-z0-9]*)?$ {
    try_files $uri /notes/index.php?note=$1&mode=$2;
}

Caddy2

https://example.com {

    root * /srv/notepad
    encode gzip zstd

    file_server {
        hide /_tmp
    }

    @npath {
        path_regexp note ^/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/?([a-z0-9]*)?$
    }

    rewrite @npath /index.php?note={http.regexp.note.1}&mode={http.regexp.note.2}&{query}
    php_fastcgi 127.0.0.1:9000
}

hide /_tmp is important — without it, stored notes are served as static files (the upstream Apache config uses _tmp/.htaccess to deny HTTP access, but Caddy has no equivalent of that file).

License

Copyright 2012 Pere Orga pere@orga.cat

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See the header of index.php and http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 for the full text.