Published: Jan 29, 2026 by Isaac Johnson
I came across PozNote from a Marius Post about installing to a NAS. As we just looked at Alexandrie, I wanted to compare and contrast this similar self-hosted document suite.
Joplin is another on my list of note taking suites to check out. This one is a bit more native-app driven. I’ll explore launching in docker and using on Android.
Poznote
The initial setup is really quite easy as Tim Poznanski provides a Docker-compose file
Let’s start with a docker instance.
I’ll clone down the repo
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces$ git clone https://github.com/timothepoznanski/poznote.git
Cloning into 'poznote'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 21194, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (363/363), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (165/165), done.
remote: Total 21194 (delta 211), reused 207 (delta 197), pack-reused 20831 (from 3)
Receiving objects: 100% (21194/21194), 108.25 MiB | 10.26 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (12995/12995), done.
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces$ cd poznote/
We then need an .env file.
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote$ cp .env.example .env
Then fire it up
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote$ docker compose up
[+] Running 23/23
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[+] Running 2/2
✔ Network poznote_default Created 0.1s
✔ Container poznote-webserver-1 Created 0.5s
Attaching to webserver-1
webserver-1 | Poznote Initialization Script - Setting up data directory...
webserver-1 | Setting correct permissions recursively on /var/www/html/data...
webserver-1 | Final permissions check for /var/www/html/data:
webserver-1 | total 28
webserver-1 | drwxrwxr-x 7 www-data www-data 4096 Jan 23 13:33 .
webserver-1 | drwxr-xr-x 1 www-data www-data 4096 Jan 23 04:22 ..
webserver-1 | drwxrwxr-x 2 www-data www-data 4096 Jan 23 13:33 attachments
webserver-1 | drwxrwxr-x 2 www-data www-data 4096 Jan 23 13:33 backups
webserver-1 | drwxrwxr-x 2 www-data www-data 4096 Jan 23 13:33 database
webserver-1 | drwxrwxr-x 2 www-data www-data 4096 Jan 23 13:33 entries
webserver-1 | drwxrwxr-x 2 www-data www-data 4096 Jan 23 13:33 users
webserver-1 | /usr/lib/python3.12/site-packages/supervisor/options.py:13: UserWarning: pkg_resources is deprecated as an API. See https://setuptools.pypa.io/en/latest/pkg_resources.html. The pkg_resources package is slated for removal as early as 2025-11-30. Refrain from using this package or pin to Setuptools<81.
webserver-1 | import pkg_resources
webserver-1 | 2026-01-23 13:33:13,486 INFO Set uid to user 0 succeeded
webserver-1 | 2026-01-23 13:33:13,492 INFO RPC interface 'supervisor' initialized
webserver-1 | 2026-01-23 13:33:13,492 CRIT Server 'unix_http_server' running without any HTTP authentication checking
webserver-1 | 2026-01-23 13:33:13,493 INFO supervisord started with pid 1
webserver-1 | 2026-01-23 13:33:14,496 INFO spawned: 'nginx' with pid 17
webserver-1 | 2026-01-23 13:33:14,501 INFO spawned: 'php-fpm' with pid 18
webserver-1 | [23-Jan-2026 13:33:14] NOTICE: fpm is running, pid 18
webserver-1 | [23-Jan-2026 13:33:14] NOTICE: ready to handle connections
webserver-1 | 2026-01-23 13:33:15,539 INFO success: nginx entered RUNNING state, process has stayed up for > than 1 seconds (startsecs)
webserver-1 | 2026-01-23 13:33:15,540 INFO success: php-fpm entered RUNNING state, process has stayed up for > than 1 seconds (startsecs)
I can now reach the login page at http://localhost:8040
We are greeted with a nice welcome note by Tim
The actions we can take (from left to right) are “search/replace”, “favourite”, “Share Note” (cloud), “Attachments”, “Open In New Tab”, “Duplicate”, “Move”, “Download”, “Convert to Markdown”, “Delete” and “Information”.
Information gives us some details like title, when it was created and modified and tags:
Let’s try using it a bit:
If we click the gear icon we can go to settings
it is here we can do occasional backups of all the notes
The restore is similar with more of a question driven wizard
The “Disaster Recovery” assumes the DB may have been corrupted and can rescan things to recreate user accounts and sharing links
User management let’s me rename users via Actions and create a new profile
However, passwords are shared (that is, admin users use the “admin” password from the .env file and the users use the “user” password set in .env)
This is not the case, however, if we setup SSO (in which case the federated IdP verifies passwords and we just need to have a user account created with a matching email address).
Exposing externally
Let’s fire up an A Record first as we’ll need that soon
$ az account set --subscription "Pay-As-You-Go" && az network dns record-set a add-record -g idjdnsrg -z tpk.pw -a 174.53.161.33 -n notes
{
"ARecords": [
{
"ipv4Address": "174.53.161.33"
}
],
"TTL": 3600,
"etag": "0182c2a8-df28-4ef7-bb84-53132c995ca6",
"fqdn": "notes.tpk.pw.",
"id": "/subscriptions/d955c0ba-13dc-44cf-a29a-8fed74cbb22d/resourceGroups/idjdnsrg/providers/Microsoft.Network/dnszones/tpk.pw/A/notes",
"name": "notes",
"provisioningState": "Succeeded",
"resourceGroup": "idjdnsrg",
"targetResource": {},
"trafficManagementProfile": {},
"type": "Microsoft.Network/dnszones/A"
}
I’m going to use Helm to sort this out.
I built out charts with Gemini CLI based on the Dockerfile. Then created a proper values file
autoscaling:
enabled: true
maxReplicas: 2
minReplicas: 1
targetCPUUtilizationPercentage: 80
config:
POZNOTE_PASSWORD: "sampleadmin"
POZNOTE_PASSWORD_USER: "sampleuser"
persistence:
enabled: true
storageClass: "local-path"
accessMode: ReadWriteOnce
size: 5Gi
ingress:
annotations:
cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer: azuredns-tpkpw
ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-body-size: "0"
ingress.kubernetes.io/ssl-redirect: "true"
kubernetes.io/tls-acme: "true"
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-body-size: "0"
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-read-timeout: "3600"
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-send-timeout: "3600"
className: nginx
enabled: true
hosts:
- host: notes.tpk.pw
paths:
- path: /
pathType: ImplementationSpecific
tls:
- hosts:
- notes.tpk.pw
secretName: notestpkpw-tls
I can now use the values to install
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote$ helm install poznote -f ./values.yml ./charts/poznote/
NAME: poznote
LAST DEPLOYED: Fri Jan 23 11:09:06 2026
NAMESPACE: default
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
TEST SUITE: None
The first issue I encountered was the helm charts neglected to create an SA so the RS was blocked
$ kubectl describe rs poznote-5568d5bcb7 | tail -n1
Warning FailedCreate 51s (x16 over 3m35s) replicaset-controller Error creating: pods "poznote-5568d5bcb7-" is forbidden: error looking up service account default/poznote: serviceaccount "poznote" not found
I had Gemini CLI help sort that out:
This time it created a pod that started to launch
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote$ kubectl get po | grep poz
poznote-5568d5bcb7-f4rgv 0/1 ContainerCreating 0 12s
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote$ kubectl get po | grep poz
poznote-5568d5bcb7-f4rgv 1/1 Running 0 110s
Once the cert was satisfied I could access the site
The first step I’ll do is to rename the admin user
SSO
I’ll use GCP Oauth Federated identity. I start with going to the API and Services section, OAuth consent screen
From there I’ll use “Create Client”
I’ll want to use “/oidc_callback.php” for the callback for this app
We can also edit this later (for instance, fix the Redirect URI)
This will give us a Client ID and Secret we’ll need for the SSO section
I’ll now add them as a block to the values file
config:
POZNOTE_PASSWORD: "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
POZNOTE_PASSWORD_USER: "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
POZNOTE_OIDC_ENABLED: "true"
POZNOTE_OIDC_PROVIDER_NAME: "Google"
POZNOTE_OIDC_ISSUER: "https://accounts.google.com"
POZNOTE_OIDC_CLIENT_ID: "511842454269-iugi6qdj6p9qlel9n0qklgejdckc6a12.apps.googleusercontent.com"
POZNOTE_OIDC_CLIENT_SECRET: "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
POZNOTE_OIDC_REDIRECT_URI: "https://notes.tpk.pw/oidc_callback.php"
POZNOTE_OIDC_SCOPES: "openid profile email"
I’ll upgrade with helm, but because this really just changes the Configmap, I need to forcibly bounce the pod
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote$ !2086
helm upgrade poznote -f ./values.yml ./charts/poznote/
Release "poznote" has been upgraded. Happy Helming!
NAME: poznote
LAST DEPLOYED: Fri Jan 23 13:48:39 2026
NAMESPACE: default
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 2
TEST SUITE: None
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote$ kubectl get po | grep poz
poznote-5568d5bcb7-f4rgv 1/1 Running 0 152m
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote$ kubectl get po | grep poz
poznote-5568d5bcb7-f4rgv 1/1 Running 0 152m
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote$ kubectl delete po poznote-5568d5bcb7-f4rgv
pod "poznote-5568d5bcb7-f4rgv" deleted
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote$ kubectl get po | grep poz
poznote-5568d5bcb7-zhdzg 1/1 Running 0 5s
We can now see SSO as an option, but to use it, I’ll need to add users
Here we can see me adding a user, verifying it works and then logging out to show the admin user cannot see the new users files (My New Note)
API
We can use the REST API to get things like notes associated to a user:
For instance, the admin users
$ curl -u 'builder:xxxxxxxxxxxxx' -H "X-User-ID: 1" https://notes.tpk.pw/api/v1/notes
{"success":true,"notes":[{"id":1,"heading":"Welcome to Poznote","type":"note","tags":null,"folder":"Getting Started","folder_id":1,"workspace":"Poznote","updated":"2026-01-23 17:28:56","created":"2026-01-23 17:28:56"}]}
I can fetch my federated user as well if I know the key ID
$ curl -u 'builder:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx' -H "X-User-ID: 3" https://notes.tpk.pw/apq/v1/notes | j
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 407 0 407 0 0 3662 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 3700
{
"success": true,
"notes": [
{
"id": 2,
"heading": "My New Note",
"type": "markdown",
"tags": "",
"folder": "Getting Started",
"folder_id": 1,
"workspace": "Poznote",
"updated": "2026-01-23 20:02:09",
"created": "2026-01-23 20:01:59"
},
{
"id": 1,
"heading": "Welcome to Poznote",
"type": "note",
"tags": null,
"folder": "Getting Started",
"folder_id": 1,
"workspace": "Poznote",
"updated": "2026-01-23 20:01:41",
"created": "2026-01-23 20:01:41"
}
]
}
MCP Server
We can see the documentation for the MCP server included here
There is a way to run this as an httpStreamable with just python and a virtual env
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote$ cd mcp-server/
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote/mcp-server$ python3 -m venv venv
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote/mcp-server$ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote/mcp-server$ pip install --upgrade pip
Requirement already satisfied: pip in ./venv/lib/python3.11/site-packages (23.3.1)
Collecting pip
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Then install the libs and use the import command to verify we have all the required libraries installed
(venv) builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote/mcp-server$ pip install -e .
Obtaining file:///home/builder/Workspaces/poznote/mcp-server
Installing build dependencies ... done
Checking if build backend supports build_editable ... done
Getting requirements to build editable ... done
Installing backend dependencies ... done
Preparing editable metadata (pyproject.toml) ... done
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Building wheels for collected packages: poznote-mcp-server
Building editable for poznote-mcp-server (pyproject.toml) ... done
Created wheel for poznote-mcp-server: filename=poznote_mcp_server-2.0.0-py3-none-any.whl size=3798 sha256=35c6bfcb8265f881c4c122a4b4ae72323cb13a1e18fadf82f70da30c833bd49d
Stored in directory: /tmp/pip-ephem-wheel-cache-exv8wnh5/wheels/ce/d8/23/efd3bf9165997d0dd03cdfd2b3953ff6a0fa97cf0a5315dbd9
Successfully built poznote-mcp-server
Installing collected packages: typing-extensions, rpds-py, python-multipart, python-dotenv, pyjwt, pycparser, idna, httpx-sse, h11, click, certifi, attrs, annotated-types, uvicorn, typing-inspection, referencing, pydantic-core, httpcore, cffi, anyio, starlette, pydantic, jsonschema-specifications, httpx, cryptography, sse-starlette, pydantic-settings, jsonschema, mcp, poznote-mcp-server
Successfully installed annotated-types-0.7.0 anyio-4.12.1 attrs-25.4.0 certifi-2026.1.4 cffi-2.0.0 click-8.3.1 cryptography-46.0.3 h11-0.16.0 httpcore-1.0.9 httpx-0.28.1 httpx-sse-0.4.3 idna-3.11 jsonschema-4.26.0 jsonschema-specifications-2025.9.1 mcp-1.25.0 poznote-mcp-server-2.0.0 pycparser-3.0 pydantic-2.12.5 pydantic-core-2.41.5 pydantic-settings-2.12.0 pyjwt-2.10.1 python-dotenv-1.2.1 python-multipart-0.0.21 referencing-0.37.0 rpds-py-0.30.0 sse-starlette-3.2.0 starlette-0.52.1 typing-extensions-4.15.0 typing-inspection-0.4.2 uvicorn-0.40.0
(venv) builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote/mcp-server$ python -c "import poznote_mcp; print('poznote_mcp OK')"
poznote_mcp OK
We can now run it
(venv) builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote/mcp-server$ export POZNOTE_API_URL=https://notes.tpk.pw/api/v1
export POZNOTE_USERNAME=builder
export POZNOTE_PASSWORD=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
export POZNOTE_USER_ID=3
export POZNOTE_DEFAULT_WORKSPACE=Poznote
(venv) builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote/mcp-server$
(venv) builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote/mcp-server$ poznote-mcp serve --host=0.0.0.0 --port=8877
2026-01-23 20:44:59,963 - poznote-mcp - INFO - Starting Poznote MCP Server (HTTP mode on 0.0.0.0:8877)...
INFO: Started server process [87870]
INFO: Waiting for application startup.
2026-01-23 20:44:59,988 - mcp.server.streamable_http_manager - INFO - StreamableHTTP session manager started
INFO: Application startup complete.
INFO: Uvicorn running on http://0.0.0.0:8877 (Press CTRL+C to quit)
Testing with Gemini CLI
Gemini CLI
Let’s add it to Gemini CLI
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote$ nvm use lts/jod
Now using node v22.22.0 (npm v10.9.4)
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/poznote$ gemini mcp add --transport http poznote http://localhost:8877/mcp
MCP server "poznote" added to project settings. (http)
We can now see the poznote MCP server with tools listed upon firing up Gemini CLI and using /mcp list
Creating some AI notes
I first used Gemini CLI
Which took a few to work out
But it did want to pivot to using Python3 for setting it up
However, that did work
and we can see the output
Copilot
I set this up in VS Code for Copilot
and asked it to create Camping notes
Which worked great
Solving a problem? Creating a doc?
I wanted to solve a real problem/challenge, not just a made up test.
Years ago, my buddy created and sent out a word doc for BWCA trips which I’ve had imported into Google Docs.
I can export it as markdown
I’ll now fire up the MCP server and copy the doc locally
I verified Gemini could see the MCP server and it was running
I can now use Gemini CLI to not only load it to Poznote, but reformat it for warm vs cold weather:
which create a pretty good file (though it might still need some refinement)
Now I have yet to get video to work - and maybe that will just not happen - but I did find it renders Mermaid diagrams natively:
using just the “mermaid” tag:
Joplin
We explored Poznote in detail, but there was another app that seemed very similar, Joplin which I had noted from an older Marius post.
While the Website for Joplin doesn’t really cover installing the server, we can look to the Docker compose file
I can use docker compose up on the dev file to get started
I can now reach the server on port 22300
We can now login with admin@localhost/admin
Once I logged in and changed the admin password, I could see the main dashboard
The next step would likely be to add users
However, the Joplin “server” is really just a backend. All the functionality lives in native apps
Android App
So let’s install the android app
To set a sync server, we have to Configuration and then click “Synchronisation” (sic)
From there we have a variety of options including their own Cloud option as well as our server
It would be there that I could set values to my ingress server, or if in the same network, the local IP of my laptop running Joplin
Using Joplin
We can create a variety of options from the “+” new menu option
For instance, I unfolded and quickly made some diagrams with text
Those diagrams can then be added to a document as a local reference
which renders fine, locally
But now is where we get stuck. I can’t really export it in any real way.
If I “email” the document, this is what they see:
I synced to OneDrive, which did back things up, but as you can see, not in a usable way
Summary
Today we started with Poznote by Tim Poznanski. In many ways, it is similar to Alexandrie, but it has some key features that Alexandrie lacks: namely a built-in MCP server and easy to setup MFA. It’s a nice extra that we have native Mermaid diagrams as I often use them in my Github and Azure repos.
I was just thinking of starting to use it for an app and leveraging the “tasks” list (to compare with Vikunja)
The other suite+app we explored was Joplin by Laurent Cozic. It has a lot of interesting features in the android app, but the lack of a usable web back end means I’m unlikely to move forward with it. I do as much work on my laptops and desktops as I do on my phone and cannot live in a mobile-app-only system. That said, it was very easy to use and if you want to use their backend, they have a reasonable SaaS offering:
And for many, a key feature is that it is not using a US-based cloud provider. From their FAQ:
Joplin Cloud data and servers are all located in France (Paris), thus your data benefits from strong data protection regulations including GDPR
