Skip to main content

Trilium Notes smart home integration, free and open source

Trilium Notes integration for Gladys Assistant

Your Trilium notes in Gladys: counters, to-dos, changed notes, day note journal from scenes.

View on GitHubAll integrations

Connect Gladys to Trilium Notes (TriliumNext), the self-hosted hierarchical note-taking application: follow your counters and your open to-dos, react when a note is created or changed, create notes from your scenes, and keep a journal of the house in the day note of Trilium, which Gladys fills in line by line. Everything stays on your local network: Gladys talks directly to your Trilium server, through its ETAPI.

Tested against a real TriliumNext v0.106.1 (the triliumnext/trilium Docker image). Feedback welcome on the Gladys forum.

Prerequisites​

  • Gladys Assistant 5.1 or later.
  • A Trilium server reachable from the Gladys machine: TriliumNext (tested with 0.106.1; older versions with the ETAPI may work, untested). The desktop application alone has no server: use its server edition, or a synchronization server.
  • An ETAPI token: in Trilium, open Options → ETAPI and click Create new ETAPI token. Copy it: it is shown once.

Configuration​

  1. Open the Configuration tab of the integration.
  2. In Trilium address, enter the address you open Trilium at, for example 192.168.1.50:8080 or https://notes.example.org.
  3. Paste the ETAPI token.
  4. Read Trilium every: 5, 15 (default), 30 or 60 minutes. Changed notes are announced at the next read.
  5. To-do label: the label of your to-dos, todo by default. A to-do is open while the note carries this label and not the label #done.
  6. Language of names and messages sets the feature names (fixed when the device is added) and the texts of the integration. French by default.
  7. Save, then use Test the connection: it shows the version of Trilium and the number of notes.
  8. In the Discovery tab, add the Trilium device.

Devices​

Trilium (one device for the server):

FeatureValue
Notesnumber of notes (archived and hidden ones excepted)
Notes changed todaynotes created or changed since midnight
Open to-dosnotes with the to-do label and without #done
Latest changed notetitle of the note created or changed most lately

The counters keep their history. The device keeps its identity when the address of the server changes.

Dashboard widget​

Trilium: three tiles (notes, changed today, to-dos) and the eight notes changed last, with the time of the change. In the widget settings, Label (for example todo or shopping) lists the notes carrying it and not #done instead: a to-do list on the dashboard. Hide the counters keeps the list only. When Trilium is reached over https, each note opens in Trilium.

Scene triggers​

  • Trilium note created or updated: a note is created or changed in Trilium. Filter: Change (created, updated, or empty: both).
  • Labeled Trilium note changed: the same, for the notes carrying a label: Label (required, the label name without #, exactly as written in Trilium, e.g. todo) and Change. The inherited labels and those of a template count. A note with several labels fires once per label name, so a scene set on one label runs once.

Variables: Note title, Change (created or updated), Note address, Labels (the labels of the note itself, as #name=value), Note id, and Label for the second trigger.

The first read after the installation is silent: the notes already there are not announced. The notes written by this integration are never announced. At most ten notes are announced per read, the oldest first; the next ones wait for the next read. Past 50 changes between two reads (an import), ten are announced and the rest is counted as seen.

Scene actions​

  • Add a line to the Trilium day note: Line, added at the end of the note of today in the journal of Trilium, as a new paragraph, starting with the time unless Start with the time is off. Trilium creates the day note (and its month and year) when it is missing, from your day template if you have one. The line is written as plain text.
  • Create a Trilium note: Title, and optionally Parent note (the exact title or the id of an existing note; empty: the root), Content (plain text, one paragraph per line) and Labels (separated by commas, name=value for a label with a value). The to-do label (todo by default) makes it a to-do. An unknown parent is an error: the integration never creates one.

Both return Note id, Note title and Note address; Create a Trilium note also returns Parent note.

Scene examples​

  • House journal: when the boiler pressure drops below 1 bar → Add a line to the Trilium day note, "Boiler pressure below 1 bar". Each day, the day note keeps what happened in the house.
  • Voice to-do: a voice scene → Create a Trilium note, parent Shopping, title from the request, labels todo. The Open to-dos counter and the widget show it.
  • Know what changed: trigger Labeled Trilium note changed, label family → send a message "{{triggerEvent.data.note_title}} was updated".
  • To-dos reminder: every evening, when Open to-dos is above 5 → send a message.

Troubleshooting​

  • "Trilium refused the ETAPI token": the token was deleted or mistyped. Create a new one in Options → ETAPI.
  • "Trilium does not answer": check the address and the port from the Gladys machine. The container uses a bridge network: localhost is the container itself, enter the IP address of the server instead.
  • "Trilium answers at another address": the address redirects, usually from http to https. Enter the address your browser ends up at, with https://.
  • "This address does not answer like Trilium": a proxy login page answers instead of Trilium. Enter the address of Trilium itself.
  • "The day note is protected": Trilium does not give the content of a protected note to the ETAPI. Unprotect the journal, or write elsewhere with Create a Trilium note.
  • To see more in the logs of the integration, set LOG_LEVEL=debug.

Limits​

  • The triggers fire at the next read (15 minutes by default), not instantly: Trilium pushes nothing. Notes deleted or moved are not announced, nor a label added alone (Trilium leaves the note's modification time unchanged); a note saved several times between two reads is announced once.
  • Protected notes are counted, but their content is never read nor written, and their title shows as "Protected note".
  • Archived notes are left out everywhere: counters, to-dos and triggers.
  • A read is a handful of ETAPI searches. The counts read the list of matching notes as a stream, without keeping it: a base of tens of thousands of notes fits in the memory of the container, but takes a little longer to count.
  • The integration never deletes nor moves anything in Trilium.
  • Not affiliated with Trilium Notes nor TriliumNext.

Configuration settings​

These are the settings Trilium Notes asks for in its configuration screen in Gladys.

SettingTypeRequiredDescription
Connect TriliumsectionNoEnter the address of your Trilium server (Trilium Notes or TriliumNext) and an ETAPI token: in Trilium, open Options → ETAPI → Create new ETAPI token.
Trilium addressstringYesThe address you open Trilium at in a browser.
ETAPI tokensecretYesShown once, when the token is created.
Read Trilium everyselectNoChanged notes are announced at the next read.
To-do labelstringNoOpen to-dos are the notes with this label and without #done.
Language of names and messagesselectNoFeature names are set when a device is added to Gladys.

How to install Trilium Notes in Gladys​

  1. In Gladys, open Integrations: Trilium Notes appears in the catalog, next to the native integrations, with a community badge.
  2. Click Install. Gladys pulls the Docker image (ghcr.io/guim31/gladys-trilium:1.0.0), starts it in a sandbox isolated from the core, and generates the integration's interface (devices, discovery and configuration).
  3. Open the Configuration screen of the integration, fill in the settings, and save.
  4. You can also install it directly from its repository URL: https://github.com/guim31/gladys-trilium.

Trilium Notes requires Gladys >=5.1.0. The catalog inside Gladys refreshes every hour, so a new version becomes available at most one hour after its release.

Not running Gladys yet? It is free and open source: follow the installation guide to get started.

About external integrations​

Trilium Notes is an external integration: a community integration packaged as a Docker container and published on GitHub, that Gladys installs in one click and runs in a sandbox isolated from its core. It is published and maintained by guim31, not by the Gladys core team.

Subscribe to the Gladys Assistant newsletter

A few emails per month about new releases and project news. Sent by Pierre-Gilles Leymarie, founder of the project. Unsubscribe anytime 🙂
Last updated on