A CLI for SilverBullet, the self-hosted Markdown note-taking platform.

Work with your SilverBullet notes from the terminal. Pages live on your local filesystem and sync to your server when you tell them to. One binary, no runtime dependencies.

• Page operations are local-first; sync is explicit
• Bidirectional sync with conflict detection and resolution
• Page CRUD: create, read, edit, delete, append, move, list
• Daily notes with configurable templates and date offsets
• Journaling: quick-entry, stdin, date-prefix routing, list/filter past entries (jrnl-flavoured)
• Space Lua evaluation, index queries, log streaming, screenshots, and tag introspection via the Runtime API (optional)
• OS keychain integration for token storage (optional)
• TTY-aware output: human-readable when interactive, JSON when piped
• Single static binary

Download the latest release for your platform from the releases page.

Example (Linux x86_64):

curl -LO https://github.com/cam-barts/sb-cli/releases/latest/download/sb-v1.0.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
tar xzf sb-v1.0.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
sudo mv sb /usr/local/bin/

cargo install --git https://github.com/cam-barts/sb-cli

Or build locally:

git clone https://github.com/cam-barts/sb-cli
cd sb-cli
cargo build --release
# Binary at target/release/sb

• A running SilverBullet v2.x server

# Point sb at your server
sb init https://sb.example.com

# Create a page
sb page create "Meeting Notes" --content "# Meeting Notes"

# List pages
sb page list

# Pull from server
sb sync pull

# Open today's daily note in $EDITOR
sb daily

sb daily doubles as a journal in the spirit of jrnl, but each entry lands as a SilverBullet bullet with inline attributes ([time:: 14:32], [starred:: true]), so they are queryable from Space Lua and sb query rather than living in opaque .txt files.

# Quick entry — joined positional text becomes a timestamped bullet
sb daily Finished the migration spike

# Stdin pipe — multi-line entries land as a single bullet with continuation indent
echo "two\nthoughts" | sb daily

# Route to another day with a small natural-date prefix
sb daily today: wrote the plan
sb daily yesterday: pretended to write the plan
sb daily 2026-05-15: backfilled

# Star an entry (sets [starred:: true])
sb daily --star celebrated finishing the cutover

# Override or omit the time attribute
sb daily --time 09:00 morning standup
sb daily --no-time todo: pick up groceries

# Listing/filtering past entries — any view flag switches read mode
sb daily -n 5
sb daily --from 2026-05-01 --contains migration
sb daily --tags engineering,ops --starred --short
sb daily --on 2026-05-15 --format json | jq .

Want to drop the daily suffix? Add alias jrnl='sb daily' to your shell rc; all flags above work unchanged.

Configuration lives in .sb/config.toml inside your initialized space directory.

server_url = "https://sb.example.com"

[sync]
dir = "space"              # Local directory name (default: "space")
workers = 4                # Concurrent sync workers (default: 4)
attachments = false        # Sync non-Markdown files (default: false)
exclude = ["_plug/*"]      # Glob patterns to exclude (default: ["_plug/*"])
include = []               # Force-include patterns (default: [])

[daily]
path = "Journal/{{date}}"  # Daily note path template (default: "Journal/{{date}}")
dateFormat = "%Y-%m-%d"    # Date format string (default: "%Y-%m-%d")
template = "Daily"         # Template page name (optional)
timeFormat = "%H:%M"       # Time format used for [time:: ...] attributes (default: "%H:%M")
bulletStyle = "*"          # Bullet character for journal entries: "*" or "-" (default: "*")

[shell]
enabled = false            # Enable shell endpoint access (default: false)

[auth]
keychain = false           # Use OS keychain for token storage (default: false)

[runtime]
available = false          # Runtime API available on server (default: false)

1. CLI flags (e.g., --token)
2. Environment variables (SB_SERVER_URL, SB_TOKEN, SB_SYNC_DIR, etc.)
3. OS keychain (auth token only, when auth.keychain = true)
4. Config file (.sb/config.toml)
5. Built-in defaults

Every config field has a SB_ environment variable. sync.workers maps to SB_SYNC_WORKERS, and so on.

Run the full test suite locally:

cargo test

Generate a coverage report (requires cargo-llvm-cov):

cargo install cargo-llvm-cov
cargo llvm-cov --lib --html  # writes target/llvm-cov/html/index.html

CI enforces a region-coverage floor of 80% on every push and pull request (coverage job in .github/workflows/ci.yml). Drops below the floor fail the build. The threshold is intentionally a ratchet — raise it (in its own PR) when the repo holds a new sustained high; don't lower it without an explicit waiver.

The coverage badge at the top of this README is auto-updated by CI. On every push to main, the coverage job writes a shields.io endpoint JSON to the badges branch with the current region-coverage percentage and a colour bucket (brightgreen ≥ 90, green ≥ 80, yellow ≥ 70, orange ≥ 60, otherwise red). PRs intentionally don't update the badge — only merges to main do.

Recommended one-time setup so the badge can only be moved by the workflow:

1. Settings → Branches → Add branch protection rule (or Settings → Rules → Rulesets → New branch ruleset for the newer flow).
2. Branch name pattern: badges.
3. Enable Restrict who can push to matching branches (classic) or Restrict updates (ruleset).
4. Allow only github-actions[bot] to push (classic: add it to the allow-list; ruleset: leave the rule rejecting everyone and add github-actions[bot] — or "Repository admin" if you want a manual override — as a bypass actor).
5. Optional but recommended: enable Do not allow force pushes and Do not allow deletions so the branch's history is append-only.

Same pattern works for main once you're ready to gate direct pushes: require the test, lint, and coverage checks, restrict who can push, and disable force-pushes.

Built for SilverBullet, created by Zef Hemel.

Inspired by:

• zk -- plain text note-taking from the terminal (which I still love using)
• nb -- command line notebook, bookmarking, and knowledge base
• jrnl -- friction-free CLI journaling. sb daily borrows its quick-entry ergonomics (positional text, stdin, date-prefix routing, view flags) while keeping every entry as a SilverBullet bullet with inline attributes so it stays queryable

Most of this project was vibe coded with Claude Opus 4.6 via Claude Code to meet one person's specific requirements (mine). Credit to the enormous body of open source software the models were trained on, this project wouldn't exist without it.

MIT -- see LICENSE for details.