Published: 2025-07-11
I’ve become increasingly interested in self-hosting over the past few years. I manage all my own business and client websites myself on a VPS, but I’ve never had much interest in building a homelab. My Raspberry Pi 1B I got as a gift many years ago has just been sitting in a box as I never came up with a proper use for it. I did install and boot it once or twice and played some Minecraft but that was pretty much it.
I use Google Keep a lot. It’s my second most used app on my phone right after web browser and I have a tab ready on my desktop whenever I need quickly to write something down. However, as many others in tech (and even non-tech) circles, I’ve become a little concerned about privacy with the rise of AI. I’ve also always liked the idea of owning your own data.
This is why I’ve been researching alternative note taking apps from time to time, but never really committed to even trying anything different. A recent video by a popular YouTuber rekindled my interest in the subject and this time I decided on a whim to actually do something about it.
I did some research and landed on Joplin. As I said, I’ve been researching these for a while and decided to pick one that seems to be popular (and works with Nextcloud as that’s what I’m really interested in).
Now, obviously I need to sync the notes so that’s what I researched next. I could rent a server to host Nextcloud, but I feel like starting small and I do have that unused Raspberry Pi…
Joplin syncs with WebDAV so I just need to find and host a lightweight WebDAV server. So I search for “lightweight webdav server” and look at the first one that comes up: KaraDAV. It’s written in PHP (which I’m very experienced in), uses SQLite3 (which I use and am a fan of) and supports Nextcloud (don’t know if I need it, but I like the word “Nextcloud”). It’s perfect so let’s get started!
Let’s start with Linux fan’s favorite: picking a distro. My Raspberry Pi model B isn’t very powerful so I want something that’s lightweight. I also want something that’s easy to install headlessly as I want to try to get it running without connecting a keyboard or a display and just SSH in.
After some research (and briefly considering Alpine Linux as I’ve used it with Docker) I decided on DietPi. I took my Pi out of the storage box, grabbed the memory card, formatted it a few times and eventually, after a bit of messing around with partitions, I had a blank 32GB SD card ready to go.
Now I have the DietPi ISO and an empty SD card. The DietPi installation instructions lay out the installation steps pretty clearly:
At first, download and install balenaEtcher. This application flashes OS images to SD cards and USB drives, safely and easily on Windows, macOS, Linux.
So what do I do? I’ve installed Linux before so obviously I know what I’m doing. I ignore the instructions and use Ventoy instead as that’s what I’ve used before. Just copy the ISO to the SD card and be done with it.
I want this installation to be headless and remember Ventoy having a boot menu, so I spend some time learning how to configure Ventoy to automatically launch the distro so I don’t have to plug in a monitor or a keyboard. I also did some configuring for automated install at boot, but eventually realized that DietPi allows me to SSH in to complete the install manually, which seemed like a better option.
So now I have an SD card with a headless install (and further manual configuration via SSH) ready to go. So I plop the SD card into the Pi, plug the power and network cables in and wait. I decide to give it 15 minutes to install itself as I know the Pi is slow.
As I wait for the installation, I research my options for a dynamic DNS setup. I look at my domain provider, DietPi DDNS and my router configuration to figure out the best way to do it. As I’m going through my router config to see if that would be a good place to set up DDNS, I’m beginning to wonder why the LAN port Pi is connected to doesn’t show up in the network chart.
Eventually I give in, grab a spare monitor and plug it into the Pi. Nothing. Hard reboot. Nothing. So it’s a boot issue. Granted, I could’ve figured this out by just looking at the single bright red LED on the Pi, but it’s been a while since I last saw those LEDs light up so I don’t remember how it’s supposed to look.
After some quick research I find out that my old Pi doesn’t support the architechture or boot system or whatever it is that Ventoy uses. Oops! I guess I should’ve followed the instructions and used balenaEtcher instead. So I format and flash the SD card again, this time with balenaEtcher, and plop it back into the Pi. Success! Now more LEDs light up and there’s terminal output on the monitor. The Pi also shows up in the router network chart. I unplug the monitor and commend myself for at least not having to connect a keyboard and let the installation run.
After taking a break, I ssh root@192.168.1.xxx and let the installation
complete. Configure locale, timezone and keyboard layout and explore what DietPi
has to offer. Since I know KaraDAV runs on PHP and SQLite, I install LLSP web
stack. That’s
all I need for now, although I do spend some time checking out the DDNS options.
I decided to do the DDNS on the Pi instead of my router, but as it seems like I need to use a custom script (as DietPi doesn’t support my domain provider out of the box), I leave that (and LetsEncrypt and firewall setup) for later. I do some preliminary networking setup (mainly static IP lease) from the router.
Time for the fun part. Getting my personal configuration on the system. I
adduser myself, acquire sudo powers and log in.
First, I install Starship and
fzf. For fzf, I use a precompiled binary from
GitHub instead of Homebrew because I want to keep the Pi
light. It’s not that Homebrew is too hevay (or is it? I don’t know), but more of
“I don’t install it unless I absolutely need it”. Git, however, is something I
do need soon, so I sudo apt install git.
My dotfiles are managed with
chezmoi and that’s what I needed Git for. So I
install chezmoi and chezmoi init --apply https://github.com/Cryszon/dotfiles.git. I also figured out I need to use
https:// instead of git@ to clone without credentials. Always learning (or
maybe remembering what I forgot) I guess.
After some more tinkering with dotfiles I now had my personal configuration ready. Next, I need to get KaraDAV server up.
I had used Apache and nginx before, but lighttpd was new to me. KaraDAV has installation instructions for Apache and nginx, so I “just” needed to learn lighttpd configuration and translate the config. However, because I don’t have a domain pointed at my server yet, and I decided I want to serve KaraDAV from a subdirectory, this wasn’t so straightforward.
It took me a couple hours of trial and error, but I eventually managed to get everything working. I’ll spare you the details and just give a rough guide on what to do.
/var/www/servers/example.com/karadav/ and navigate to
the directorychown -R . www-data:www-datacp config.dist.php config.local.phpconfig.local.php:// This disables thumbnail generation to save resources and avoid having to
// install imagick
const THUMBNAIL_CACHE_PATH = NULL;
// This is needed to run KaraDAV in a subdirectory and needs to be changed later
// after setting up the domain
const WWW_URL = 'http://192.168.0.xxx/karadav/';10-rewrite.conf for lighttpdalias.url += ( "/karadav" => "/var/www/servers/example.com/karadav/www/" )
$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/karadav/.+" {
url.rewrite-if-not-file = ( "" => "/servers/example.com/karadav/www/_router.php${qsa}" )
}I now had the KaraDAV server up and running. Time to see if Joplin can replace Google Keep for me.
It took me less than 10 minutes to download and install Joplin on my desktop and set up sync to KaraDAV. Then I did the same for my Android phone. I now had notes synced through my local network. Finally, I enabled E2EE for my notes. My plan is to now use Joplin for some of my personal daily note taking to see how I like it.
It’s been a little over a week and I’ve only opened Keep a few times to check my older notes. I really like Joplin. It’s not quite as fast to open from a “cold boot” on Android as Keep, but once it’s running the editing experience is way better.
The number one feature for me in Joplin is Markdown support. I’m already using
Markdown pretty much everywhere and even tended to write my Keep notes using
Markdown syntax despite Keep having its own formatting options. Having editor
buttons map directly to Markdown (especially on mobile) is a welcome
improvement. I can now tap a single button to make a checkbox instead of
writing - [ ] one character at a time. The Insert Time button
is also very handy, since I often use dates and times in my notes.
I also feel good about is owning my data. I know that my notes are encrypted on my own server instead of being fed as training data to a LLM or used for a “personalized experience” (i.e. advertising).
I took some time to customize Joplin to my liking. I’m cautious deviating from “vanilla” experiences unless I really need to, so I didn’t install any plugins yet, but here are some things I did:
I changed application layout (View -> Change application layout) so that there’s a single side bar on the left with notes on top and notebooks on bottom. I didn’t realize this was possible until a few days in and it was a complete game changer for me.
Having my browser always open made accessing my Keep notes as simple as pressing
Ctrl+T -> K -> Enter and I wanted to be able to get to Joplin quickly
as well. For this, I enabled Show tray icon and Start application
minimized in the tray icon in the application settings. Then I just added a
shortuct to Joplin to %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup.
I use the tray icon to open Joplin as using start menu or taskbar seems to relaunch it, which takes longer.
I chose “Aritim Dark” as theme on both desktop and mobile and changed some keyboard shortcuts to match my VS Code setup.
I mentioned about DDNS earlier, but so far I’ve only synced between my desktop and phone and haven’t had the need to access the Pi from outside my local network. Nevertheless, I did the following very basic security steps to prepare for when I eventually do, as I also have a tablet I sometimes use.
# /etc/default/dropbear
# -w = Disallow root logins
# -s = Disable password logins
DROPBEAR_EXTRA_ARGS="-w -s"Installed Fail2Ban using DietPi-Software.
Configured UFW to only allow SSH traffic from inside local network
sudo ufw default deny incoming
sudo ufw default allow outgoing
sudo ufw allow from 192.168.0.0/16 to any port 22
sudo ufw allow http
sudo ufw allow https
sudo ufw enable# /boot/dietpi.txt
CONFIG_CHECK_APT_UPDATES=2There’s still more to do, such as migrating my hundreds of old notes from Keep or setting up WAN access, but I’ll get to them eventually. So far I’m happy with the setup I have and I’m especially glad I finally got to put my Pi to use after all these years.
All content © Kimmo Salmela — Source on GitHub