Trilium Server Quadlet / Podman installation

[jwhonce]

User space safe installation and setup

No need for root access or privileges to run a trilium sync server. Some of the steps below may be redundant but this is the path I took to deploy.

Versions…

trilium	0.60.4 (all the beta releases…)
podman	4.5.1
Fedora	38
quadlet	4.5.1

I started with commands below. They only need to be run once to initialize the database and then configure the server.

$ mkdir ~/.local/share/trilium-server-data
$ podman pull zadam/trilium:0.60.4
	(choose ✔ docker.io/zadam/trilium:0.60.4)
$ podman run -t --rm -i -p 8080:8080 -n trilium-server -v ~/.local/share/trilium-server-data:/home/node/trilium-data:z zadam/trilium:0.60.4

Then I…

• stopped the container podman stop trilium-server
• edited ~/.local/share/trilium-server-data/config.ini and set noAuthentication=true
  (authentication is a future item, service not exposed to Internet)

Moving on to defining a quadlet, I created ~/.config/containers/systemd/trilium-server.container with the following content.

[Unit]
Description=The Trilium Notes Server
After=local-fs.target

[Container]
Image=docker.io/zadam/trilium:0.60.4
Volume=%h/.local/share/trilium-server-data:/home/node/trilium-data:z
PublishPort=8080:8080

[Service]
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

The following commands setup systemd and quadlet to run the service we configured above.

$ loginctl enable-linger $USERNAME
$ systemctl --user daemon-reload
$ systemctl --user start trilium-server
$ systemctl --user status trilium-server
● trilium-server.service - The Trilium Notes Server
     Loaded: loaded (/home/jhonce/.config/containers/systemd/trilium-server.container; generated)
    Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/user/service.d
             └─10-timeout-abort.conf
     Active: active (running) since Fri 2023-06-23 21:29:27 MST; 11min ago
   Main PID: 43250 (conmon)
      Tasks: 27 (limit: 38067)
     Memory: 101.9M
        CPU: 3.389s
.
:

$ podman ps
CONTAINER ID  IMAGE                           COMMAND            CREATED         STATUS         PORTS                   NAMES
1cb94e69bfb6  docker.io/zadam/trilium:0.60.4  ./start-docker.sh  11 minutes ago  Up 11 minutes  0.0.0.0:8080->8080/tcp  systemd-trilium-server

I installed the trilium client from flathub, configuring the sync server as http://[host]:8080. See #4011 if you have issues with mDNS resolution for the sync server's name.

I upgraded the server container through each of the beta releases by just updating the .container file, and reloading systemd. This worked because of the stable API provided by trilium and the magic of systemd with quadlet.

@zadam Thank you for a great tool!

PS. Yes, I gathered these commands and associated text using trilium. :-)