Nomie in Docker Swarm with CouchDB

I've long been a fan of Nomie, a super fast, and super-private way to journal, collect your life's data, and reflect on your life's direction.

I think I originally stumbled across at r/quantifiedself. At the time I was unhappy in my DayJob™, and wanted a way to quantify to my boss just how unproductive a day of disruptions was (in the end I used a spreadsheet!). Nomie 2 was an iOS app, IIRC.

I've dabbled in it since v3, but never found the motivation and the discipline to actually keep track, and have noted over the years how the developer discontinued it, and then, like a true artist, restarted a fresh design to keep his baby going!

Brandon Corbin has been passionately developing Nomie for 8+ years, at one point walking away, and then 8 months later, unable to help himself, diving right back in with what would eventually become Nomie 3!

The latest version (Nomie 6) which offered a paid cloud hosting / sync service, shut down in Feb 2023. There's a heartfelt post providing context and alternatives. Brandon open-sourced all the code, so one of the geekier alternatives, buyoued by the still-passionate community of users, is to run your own Nomie instance.

Nomie Requirements

Preparation

Setup data locations

Create the location for the bind-mount of the application data, so that it's persistent:

mkdir -p /var/data/nomie

Setup environment

Create /var/data/config/nomie/nomie.env as per the following example (set your CouchDB credentials to something secure, these enable admin access to wherever CouchDB is exposed):

COUCHDB_USER=mycouchuser
COUCHDB_PASSWORD=mycouchpass

Setup CouchDB for CORS

This gets a little tricker than the standard recipe, where a frontend talks to a backend database. Since Nomie is a PWA, and stores data in the browser cache, CouchDB needs to be accessible to your web browser, so that the PWA can call it directly. This means (a) it's important to secure properly, and (b) you need to explicitly permit your Nomie site to call your CouchDB URL via CORS headers.

Create /var/data/config/nomie/couchdb.ini per the example below, being sure to use the intended FQDN of your Nomie instance for the cors origin (don't try to put comments after this line using a #, it doesn't work, ask me how I know!)

[HTTPD]
enable_cors = true

[chttpd]
enable_cors = true

[cors]
origins = https://nomie.example.com
credentials = true
methods = GET, PUT, POST, HEAD, DELETE
headers = accept, authorization, content-type, origin, referer, x-csrf-token

Setup Nomie Docker config

Finally, create a docker swarm config file in docker-compose syntax (v3), something like the example below:

version: "3.2" # https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-versioning/#version-3

services:
  nomie:
    image: ghcr.io/qcasey/nomie6-oss:master

    deploy:
      labels:
        # traefik common
        - "traefik.enable=true"
        - "traefik.docker.network=traefik_public"
        - "traefik.http.routers.nomie.rule=Host(`nomie.example.com`)"
        - "traefik.http.routers.nomie.entrypoints=https"
        - "traefik.http.services.nomie.loadbalancer.server.port=80" 
    networks:
      - traefik_public

  couchdb:
    env_file: /var/data/config/nomie/nomie.env  
    image: couchdb:3
    deploy:
      labels:
        # traefik common
        - "traefik.enable=true"
        - "traefik.docker.network=traefik_public"
        - "traefik.http.routers.nomiedb.rule=Host(`nomiedb.example.com`)"
        - "traefik.http.routers.nomiedb.entrypoints=https"
        - "traefik.http.services.nomiedb.loadbalancer.server.port=5984"       
    volumes:
      - /var/data/nomie:/opt/couchdb/data
      - /var/data/config/nomie/couchdb.ini:/opt/couchdb/etc/local.d/docker.ini      
    networks:
      - traefik_public

networks:
  traefik_public:
    external: true

Serving

Launch Nomie PWA

Launch the Nomie stack by running docker stack deploy nomie -c <path -to-docker-compose.yml>

You should now be able to access the PWA at the URL you chose - at this point, you have the equivalent to https://open-nomie.github.io/, but let's go a bit further, and setup multi-device syncing...

Setup CouchDB

Initialize CouchDB

CouchDB doesn't come setup (because the Docker image has no way of knowing whether it's a single node, or a shard of a larger cluster), so we need to set it up. Point your browser at https://<fqdn-to-your-couchdb-instance>/_utils/#setup/singlenode, and initialize the "cluster" as follows:

After creating the cluster, ignore the offer to replicate data - for our purposes, a single instance configured for production usage as an "unknown state node" is quite ok!

Create database

Using the UI, navigate to the "database" icon, and click Create Database. Name your database (I used "nomie"):

Set database permissions

Having created the database, navigate to Permissions, and under "Members", add a user named nomie:

Create database user

Users in CouchDB are "documents". (everything is a document!)

We've given permission to the database to a nomie user, but we haven't yet created that user. Use the UI to navigate to the _users database, and click on Create Document. A basic JSON string is populated for you, with a random _id value. Overwrite this string with a variation of the object below, and click Create Document.

{
  "_id": "org.couchdb.user:nomie",
  "name": "nomie",
  "type": "user",
  "roles": [],
  "password": "nomnomnom"
}

That's it, you created a CouchDB user!

Configure Nomie for CouchDB

In the Nomie PWA, navigate to More, and enter the CouchDB settings, as illustrated below:

If Nomie confirms success, and asks you to save the connection, then you've successfully connected Nomie to your CouchDB.

Repeat this on every other device/browser¹ with which you intend to use to access your synced life data!

Summary

What have we achieved? We have our own instance of Nomie, syncing multi-device access to our own CouchDB. Data persists in your browser, and synced CouchDB data is stored to /var/data/nomie (which can be safely backed-up, if it's a standalone CouchDB instance).

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