About a year ago, I discovered an exquisite chocolate mousse recipe online. Recently, when I wanted to make the chocolate mousse again, the page no longer existed. If only I had saved a copy…. To prevent losing such valuable resources, I now rely on Linkwarden [1]. You can install it on your own Linux server to collect, read, annotate, and save everything interesting you find on the web. Its AGPL-licensed code is available on GitHub [2]. If you don't want to install and maintain the software yourself, you can opt for the cloud service offered by the developers. This way, you also financially support further development.

Installation

An easy way to set up Linkwarden on your own server is using Docker. For this article, I've installed it on a system running Debian 13 (trixie). The hardware requirements are minimal. I have been running Linkwarden on a virtual machine with 4GB of RAM for some time now, alongside a few other services.

Begin by creating a directory for Linkwarden and downloading a Docker Compose file that defines the necessary containers, as well as a file containing environment variables (Listing 1). The docker-compose.yml file defines containers for the PostgreSQL database, the Meilisearch search engine, and Linkwarden itself. Configuration takes place in the .env file. Upon opening the .env file with your favorite text editor, you'll see dozens of environment variables. The only three you need to change are NEXTAUTH_SECRET, POSTGRES_PASSWORD, and MEILI_MASTER_KEY. Change these to three random strings, which you can generate using pwgen -s 20 3.

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