A pastebin for minimalists

cowyo is a self-contained shared scratchpad that makes jotting notes easy and fast. Open a page, type, and it saves automatically. Share the URL to edit with other people in real time.

Try it at cowyo.com.

Getting started

Build and run:

make serve

Then open localhost:8001. Use -port to choose a different port.

cowyo uses SQLite by default. To use PostgreSQL, set DATABASE_URL as shown in .env.example. In production, set SITE_URL to the site's public origin (for example, https://cowyo.com) so canonical links, social previews, returned paste URLs, robots.txt, and the sitemap always use the authoritative domain.

Features

Editing

Pages save automatically, and people viewing the same page see edits in real time. Each other editor's caret appears as a dim gray line and disappears when they leave. Visiting / creates a page with a memorable alliterative name such as calm-cat.

Encryption

Encryption happens entirely in the browser. The password is never sent to the server, and encrypted text cannot be recovered if the password is lost. Password fields are hidden by default and have an eye button to reveal them. On mobile, the password dialog stays inside the visible area as the on-screen keyboard opens.

Page locking

A page lock prevents editing without hiding the page's contents. Anyone with the URL can still read it.

Publishing

Pages are unpublished by default and excluded from the sitemap. Publishing makes a page discoverable to search engines and gives it a unique search description based on its plaintext content. Unpublishing removes the content from search and social-preview metadata, but does not make its URL private.

Self-destructing pages

A self-destructing page is returned one final time on its next browser or curl GET, then deleted.

Other conveniences

The cow menu can copy the page text and switch between light and dark themes. Web addresses in the text are clickable.

See About cowyo for a more complete guide.

Using curl

curl receives and sends plain text:

curl https://cowyo.com/my-notes
curl --data-binary @notes.txt https://cowyo.com/
curl --data-binary @notes.txt https://cowyo.com/my-notes

Development

Run the tests:

make test

Pull requests are welcome.

License

MIT