Self-hosting the new extension-less architecture

March 4, 2022

Some of our users like to self-host their own infrastructure for a fully sovereign, synced, and end-to-end encrypted note-taking architecture, particularly our backend syncing server. This allows you to use our official web, desktop, and mobile applications, but have those applications seamlessly sync with your own server and database. Some users also self-hosted the extensions, particularly the now defunct folders extension. For the reasons mentioned in our blog post on transitioning from an extensions architecture to a native one, leaving behind the primitive architecture required to display folders as an extension in our application was not a viable option. However, because the ability to nest tags as folders is a paid feature, users not self-hosting their own client applications found that the architectural change of moving away from extensions for core functionality was quite disruptive to their setup.

Indeed, this change was quite disruptive to our own architecture as well, which is why it took so long! But, this is the way forward towards a more cohesive, secure, and unified architecture. We’re enlivened by the feedback we’ve received about the implementation of this new direction—users really love the new built-in folders feature! But, without a clear migration path, we let down some of our loyal self-hosters whose workflows were disrupted because of this change. In the near future, we'll share a guide on how to self-host the new architecture, and gain access to all of Standard Notes' features with no restrictions on your own self-hosted server.

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