Self-Hosted Knowledge Base & Automation

What it is

A self-hosted notes and knowledge-base system that I write to daily from my phone and browser, backed by a private git repo for off-machine backup, and reachable remotely only through a Tailscale mesh network — never anything exposed to the open internet. Layered on top of it: six automated workflows, orchestrated with n8n, that keep the knowledge base current without me doing the bookkeeping by hand.

Approach

Each workflow solves a specific “someone has to do this every day or week, and it shouldn’t be me” problem:

• Nightly dev-work summary — pulls the day’s commits across every repo I own, summarizes them, and writes the result into that day’s journal entry automatically.
• Nightly work-log summary — scans local AI coding session transcripts and adds a second summary of non-code work — research, decisions — to the same journal entry.
• Weekly knowledge-base review — the most interesting one: a real Claude Code agent, scoped to read-only tools only (no edit, no shell, no network access), reads the week’s journal and project pages, cross-references them against the rest of the knowledge base, and proposes consolidation or tagging changes as a checklist. It never applies anything itself — I review and action its suggestions manually.
• Bookmark capture bridge — tagging a link in a read-it-later app automatically drops a formatted note into my inbox within the hour, and marks the source item processed so it’s never re-imported.
• New-repo bridge — creates a stub project page automatically the first time I push a brand-new GitHub repo.
• Nightly backup snapshot — commits and pushes any uncommitted changes to the private git remote every night, since real edits happen from the phone app and browser, neither of which is git-aware.

Every workflow is idempotent — reruns don’t duplicate output — and none of them depend on parsing command output that turned out to be unreliable in this particular environment; each one does its own read/merge/write instead of trusting a shell command’s captured output. Secrets never live in the repo: every credential is documented as “here’s exactly where the real value lives,” never duplicated into version control, and workflow exports get their tokens swapped before reuse on a new machine.

Outcome

The result is a personal system that runs itself: journal entries populate without manual upkeep, new repos and saved links show up in the right place automatically, and the knowledge base gets a standing weekly review from an agent that’s read-only by design — it can suggest, but it can’t touch anything, so the human stays the last word. It’s also fully documented as a rebuild runbook: the whole system could be stood back up on a new machine from the notes alone.