[burke]

I have used perkeep. I still do at least in theory. I love the concept of it but it’s become… not quite abandonware, but it never gained enough traction to really take on a full life of its own before the primary author moved on. A bit of a tragedy because the basic idea is pretty compelling.

[mikepurvis]

I evaluated it for a home server a few years ago and yeah— compelling in concept, but a system like this lives or dies by the quality of its integrations to other systems, the ability to automatically ingest photos and notes from your phone, or documents from your computer, or your tax returns from Dropbox.

A permanent private data store needs to have straightforward ways to get that data into it, and then search and consume it again once there.

[frio]

I've been similarly half-interested in it for... more than a decade now. The new release (which is what I assume prompted this post) looks pretty impressive (https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/releases/tag/v0.12).

[uf00lme]

The quality of code and reputation of the authors is excellent in this new release.

I’ve never looked at it before but this seems pretty solid, definitely worth keeping an eye on or testing.

[kamranjon]

I immediately thought about how this would be awesome if it worked with tailscale - pretty complimentary tech I think.

[vermilingua]

Why would this need to work with Tailscale? It just needs to be running on a machine in your tailnet to be accessible, what other integration is necessary?

[bradfitz]

Primarily using Tailscale for authentication as well, replacing perkeep's other auth methods.

[vermilingua]

It appears that it does integrate with Tailscale for auth (but not using tsidp via OIDC like I expected): https://perkeep.org/doc/server-config#simplemode

[bradfitz]

I'm a co-author of tsidp, btw. You don't need tsidp with a Tailscale-native app: you already know the identity of the peer. tsidp is useful for bridging from Tailscale auth to something that's unaware of Tailscale.

[tecleandor]

I think @kamranjon means that, before this tailscale compatible release happened, thought about how cool it be if it worked directly with tailscale.

[vineyardmike]

I'm on the same boat. It's well designed, works great, and I really can't get it out of my head as a well-engineered project and great idea.

But it really is nearly abandoned, and outside of the happy-path the primary author uses it for, it's desolate. There is no community around growing its usage, and pull requests have sat around for months before the maintainer replies. Which is fine if that's what the author wants (he's quite busy!), but disappointing to potential adopters. I've looked at using it, but with data types that sit outside the author's use case, and you'd really need to fork it and change code all over the repo to effectively use it. It just never hit the ideal of "store everything" it promises when it has hard-coded data types for indexing and system support.

(and yes, I did look at forking it and creating my own indexer, but some things just aren't meant to be)

[mickael-kerjean]

> There is no community around growing its usage

I just added support for perkeep in Filestash last week (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash)

[brulard]

Looks nice, thanks!

[jm4]

They released a new version today, the first release in 5 years. It looks like it was more or less dead until September.

[brulard]

Nice. I checked multiple time during last years if the project was dead or not. I would love to use it but it seemed to be rotting away.

[slightwinder]

That not really a surprise, the website and documentation is awful, not really selling the project well. I also get the impression there is not really customization possible, no integration of external stuff, just a monolithic blob, doing something. This kind of software can't succeed easily without an open architecture, or a proper selling documentation of how to utilize it for your own demand.

Kinda sad, as this looks interesting.