A new deployment mechanism for Trilium: standalone mode

Hi,

Since January of 2026 I've been working on a separate task for Trilium, called standalone mode.

Standalone mode tries to do something that I haven't seen much in this space: the traditional mechanism of shipping Trilium is either to run the desktop app alone or set up a server whereas standalone ships the server into the client. This means that you can run Trilium in a browser without the need of a server, the database will just live in your browser.

This unlocks the following potential directions:

• An official mobile app. We can invest more time in making the mobile experience without having to rewrite everything, since we can "simply" ship the standalone. This means that any investment in mobile also translated in a direct benefit for users using the PWA.
• An official sync server. With Trilium in standalone mode, we can ship it statically to CloudFlare which means that we can focus to offer an official service that allows people to sync their desktop apps while still being able to access their notes in the browser via the standalone mode.
• A demo instance so people can easily test Trilium without having to install anything and without having a shared server that other people can occasionally break. Every demo user would get their own instance, right in their browser.

From a technical point of view, the complexity is quite big with having:

• Extracted the business logic out of the server and into a shared project (called trilium-core).
• Reworking the database to also work in browser mode using WASM.
• Added browser-specific providers for the core and extracting existing Node.js glue into providers.

If you'd like to give it a try, see https://app.triliumnotes.org.

The PR is #9189 is quite big (634 commits @ 29k modifications) and it will be merged today. This will cause a significant issue with conflicts on all the branches but solving merge conflicts in all this period has been quite difficult. Since we've just released a major version, it means we have around 2 months to get all the regressions fixed.

While setting up a server for sync makes perfect sense, it also causes a lot of friction since not all users (even power users) are willing to maintain their own server running Trilium. I am aware that Trilium is leaned toward more technical people, but my personal wish is also to get closer to less technical users.

This mode is currently experimental and as such not publicized. For now let's keep the publicity to a minimum, but I would really appreciate some support with testing or feedback.

Let me know your thoughts.

[eliandoran]

cc. @perfectra1n , @Nriver , @FliegendeWurst

[meichthys]

Looks really nice @eliandoran

A tiny thing i noticed is that when i 'Logout' of the standalone instance I get a not-so-nice toast.

[meichthys]

[eliandoran]

@meichthys , you've already found a bug. ;)
Those kind of errors means that I haven't ported yet a particular route into the standalone.
We don't have authentication yet for standalone, but it's on the backlog.

[meichthys]

Maybe also related to the authentication but there's two more on the 'Advanced' and 'ETAPI' Options pages:

[meichthys]

Is this safe to test with a self-hosted server?
I.e. can I safely test a connection from my self hosted server via https://app.triliumnotes.org/ ?

[eliandoran]

@meichthys , that's the next step I plan to support in a couple of days.
Synchronization already works, but there's some tricky CORS configuration that needs to be done.
After that one is sorted out, synchronization should work just fine, I've been dogfooding it during my vacation.

[Nriver]

Quite interesting idea. I have zero knowledge for PWA and WASM, it looks like magic to me : )

Find a little glitch here, the language selection does not work on android browser apps.

1.mp4

I can choose Chinese language on PC in this page, but doesn't seem to take effect, it still loads English.

[eliandoran]

@Nriver , I think it might actually work but the translations are missing since the setup has been completely redesigned. Now that we have merged it, translations from Weblate should come through.

[contributor]

Extracted the business logic out of the server and into a shared project (called trilium-core).

@eliandoran
Are you planning to delete re-export stub files from apps/server?

Looks like these won't be needed in the future. You can import directly from "@triliumnext/core" and remove file clutter/duplicates?

[eliandoran]

@contributor , yes. Those are just an intermediate step while we refactor away imports from other services.