DearDiary

Self-hosted AI-powered daily journaling application. Capture events throughout the day and let AI generate thoughtful diary pages from your entries.

Features

• Quick event capture with keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+J)
• Multiple event types: text, health, photo, voice
• Automatic geolocation - events tagged with your location
• AI-powered diary page generation with customizable providers
• Events become immutable once a diary is generated (prevents editing past memories)
• Regenerate diary pages with additional instructions
• Generation tasks with title tracking per task
• Read all diaries with pagination (10/50/100 per page)
• Dashboard with diary excerpts
• Calendar view for browsing past entries
• Full-text search across events and diaries
• Export/Import data with version checking
• Dark/light theme support
• Self-hostable with Docker

Quick Start

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/lotherk/deardiary.git
cd deardiary

# Start with Docker
docker compose up -d

Access the app at http://localhost:8080

Default credentials: admin@localhost / changeme123

Documentation

Full documentation is available at https://lotherk.github.io/deardiary

Topics covered:

• Installation
• Quick Start
• Configuration
• Features
• API Reference
• Deployment

Configuration

1. Go to Settings and select your AI provider (Groq, OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, LM Studio)
2. Enter your API key for the selected provider
3. Optionally customize the model and base URL
4. Test the connection before saving

Development

Prerequisites

• Bun
• Node.js 20+
• Docker

Backend

cd backend
bun install
bunx prisma generate
bun run dev

Frontend

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

Build Docs Locally

cd docs
npm install
npm run dev

Docker Build

docker compose build && docker compose up -d

Project Structure

├── backend/          # Hono + Prisma backend
│   ├── prisma/      # Database schema
│   └── src/         # API routes and AI services
├── frontend/         # React + Vite frontend
│   └── src/
│       ├── pages/   # Page components
│       ├── components/
│       └── lib/     # API client, geolocation
├── docs/            # Starlight documentation site
└── docker-compose.yml

Routes

• / - Dashboard with recent diary pages and excerpts
• /today - Today's event stream (main capture page)
• /diary - Paginated diary reader (10/50/100 per page)
• /journal/:date - View/edit diary page with generation tasks
• /day/:date - View day's events
• /calendar - Calendar view
• /settings - Configuration and Export/Import

License

MIT License

Copyright 2026 Konrad Lother