SilverBullet development can happen at various level.

At its most basic level, you can do a lot using Space Lua. If this does not give enough power, you can upgrade to Plugs. If that doesn’t suffice, you can contribute to SilverBullet’s core (see below).

Stack

SilverBullet’s client is written in TypeScript and built on top of the excellent CodeMirror 6 editor component. Additional UI is built using Preact. ES Build is used to build the frontend.

Plugs are also written in TypeScript.

The SilverBullet server is written in Go.

Code structure

  • client/: The SilverBullet client, implemented with TypeScript
  • server/: The SilverBullet server, written in Go
  • plugs: Set of built-in plugs that are distributed with SilverBullet
  • libraries: A set of libraries (space scripts, page templates, slash templates) distributed with SilverBullet
  • plug-api/: Useful APIs for use in plugs
    • lib/: Useful libraries to be used in plugs
    • syscalls/: TypeScript wrappers around syscalls
    • types/: Various (client) types that can be references from plugs
  • bin
    • plug_compile.ts the plug compiler
  • scripts/: Useful scripts
  • website/: silverbullet.md website content

Development

Requirements: * Deno 2.4 or newer. * Go 1.25 or newer * Make

It's convenient to also install air for development, this tool will watch your code base for changes and automatically rebuild:

go install github.com/air-verse/air@latest

Make sure your $GOPATH/bin is in your $PATH.

To build everything and run the server using air:

air <PATH-TO-YOUR-SPACE>

Note, that if you want to pass arguments to your SilverBullet binary like -p or -L you need to this as follows:

air -- -L 0.0.0.0 <PATH-TO-YOUR-SPACE>

Alternatively, to build the project without air:

make build

To run the resulting server:

./silverbullet <PATH-TO-YOUR-SPACE>

Useful development tasks

# Clean all generated files
make clean
# Typecheck and lint all code
make check
# Format all code
make fmt
# Run all tests
make test

Build a docker container

Note, you do not need Deno nor Go locally installed for this to work:

docker build -t silverbullet .

To run:

docker run -p 3000:3000 -v <PATH-TO-YOUR-SPACE>:/space silverbullet