Notes-as-a-Service. A standalone, headless PKM engine that absorbs your existing vaults and turns them into a programmable platform.
Let's be brutally honest: every modern Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) tool is a walled garden even if it's built on top of your local files.
- Obsidian traps your markdown inside a heavy desktop app. Want an API or mobile access? Pay $50/year or compile a complex TypeScript/Electron plugin that only runs when the app is open.
- Logseq does the exact same thing in ClojureScript.
- Zim Wiki is nailed to D-Bus and Linux.
- Notion holds your data hostage in the cloud entirely.
Most of them work with plain text files on your local drive, yet they stubbornly pretend that they are the only software in the world allowed to read them. The result is vendor lock-in, zero proper server-side capabilities, and over-engineered plugin ecosystems.
Moonstone is a fundamentally different approach. It is a powerful, standalone headless PKM server (no GUI).
Point Moonstone at an empty directory, and it will instantly bootstrap a fully functioning, high-performance knowledge base with a 70+ endpoint REST API and a built-in web editor.
Already have notes? Point Moonstone at your Obsidian, Logseq, or Zim folder, and it will effortlessly digest them, translating their unique dialects into a unified API on the fly.
pipx install git+https://github.com/moonstone-app/moonstone --force --system-site-packages
moonstone --install-shortcut
# For Debian-based distros run:
# apt-get install python3-tkpipx install git+https://github.com/moonstone-app/moonstone
moonstone --install-shortcutMoonstone isn't just a parasite attached to {Obsidian,Logseq,Zim}. It’s an independent engine that understands other formats. It auto-detects your vault type and normalizes tags, internal links ([[...]]), and metadata. A simple HTTP request works identically whether Moonstone is serving its own native markdown format, an Obsidian vault, or a Zim wiki.
Run Moonstone on your home server, NAS, Raspberry Pi, or quietly in the background on your work laptop. Want to access it securely from the internet? Just expose the port via Cloudflare Tunnels, Tailscale, or ngrok, and boom — you have your own secure, private "Obsidian Sync" accessible from any browser or phone on the planet. For free.
Want to build a Kanban board or a custom dashboard for your notes? Forget about Node.js, npm run build, and Electron. An applet in Moonstone is just a folder containing an index.html file. Pure HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS talking directly to Moonstone's API. Drop the folder in, and it's live.
Edited a note via SSH using Vim? Synced a file via Dropbox? The Moonstone Web Editor open in your browser will update instantly. We use native, OS-level file watching (FSEvents on macOS, ReadDirectoryChangesW on Windows, inotify on Linux) to track disk changes and push them to clients via SSE/WebSocket with 0% CPU overhead.
Moonstone provides a powerful Python SDK (moonstone_sdk.py) for background services that run 24/7 alongside your server. This isn't just a cron job. Write background workers that act as Telegram bridges (saving messages straight to your inbox note), LLM summarizers, webhooks for external integrations, or automated broken-link checkers. Your knowledge base becomes a living, breathing ecosystem.
WebSockets, SSE, KV-store, OpenAPI specs, AI-ready dev-bundle and all the things on top of your directory of notes.
- You need 100% ownership of your data, hosted on your own hardware, with zero subscriptions, but you still demand a modern API and web access.
- You want to build cool UIs, custom AI agents, or automations on top of your notes, but you refuse to learn Electron or wrestle with bloated plugin APIs.
- You use Obsidian for daily logs and Logseq for research. Moonstone acts as the ultimate unifier, giving you a single scripting and query interface for both.
The recommended way to install Moonstone globally is using pipx (so it doesn't pollute your Python environment):
pipx install git+https://github.com/moonstone-app/moonstone --force --system-site-packagespipx install git+https://github.com/moonstone-app/moonstoneAfter that you can add desktop file with --install-shortcut flag.
(If you are contributing to the project, you can use pipx install . from the cloned repository).
Point Moonstone to any folder. If it's empty, Moonstone will initialize it. If it's an existing vault, Moonstone will read it.
moonstone ~/Documents/NotesOpen http://localhost:8090 in your browser. By default, Moonstone serves the Workspace UI — a blazing fast, zero-dependency PWA editor for your notes.
Moonstone is an ambitious open-source project aimed at tearing down the walls of the current PKM landscape.
- Star ⭐️ this repository — it's the strongest signal that you like this project.
- Join the discussion on GitHub Issues to propose API endpoints.
- Build and share your Zero-Build Applets.
Moonstone tooks some logic and ideas from the brilliant and robust Zim Wiki and is distributed under the free GPL-3.0 license. You own your notes, and you should own the code that manages them.