# Your own lesson notes Schulcloud holds the material and WebUntis holds the schedule. Neither holds what was actually said in the room — which teacher stressed what, the example that finally made it click, the aside that turns up in the test. That is in whatever you write down during the lesson, and until now it lived somewhere no agent could read. This is the third source: a directory of Markdown files the server reads, indexes and searches alongside everything else, and a small web app to write them in. ## One note per school day ``` NOTES_DIR/ 2026/ 2026-09-18.md ← Freitag, one heading per lesson 2026-09-21.md Deutsch/ 2026-09-15 Erörterung.md ← a single-subject note, e.g. from the import ``` A day note looks like this, and the shape is load-bearing: ```markdown --- title: Freitag, 18.09.2026 date: 2026-09-18 source: notes-page --- ## 1. Deutsch — 08:00–08:45 · MEI · R 204 Dreischritt: These, Argument mit Beleg, Fazit. ### Aufbau - Gegenargument nicht vergessen — kam letztes Jahr in der Arbeit dran ## 2. LF07 — 08:50–09:35 · Sb · R 108 | Präfix | Nutzbare Adressen | |---|---| | /24 | 254 | ``` **Each `##` is indexed as its own lesson.** A search for *Gegenargument* answers "my own note, Deutsch, 18.09.2026", not "my own note, Friday"; `list_notes subject=Deutsch` finds this day even though the note's frontmatter names no subject; and `what_changed` reports the lesson that changed rather than the whole day. Prose, lists, tables and `###` subheadings all live inside their lesson. Nothing forces the shape. A note with no `##` headings — an imported Apple Note, a page of revision — is indexed whole, as one piece of prose. ## The app `/app` is a small web app: a login, the day's notes, and a settings page. It is served only when `WEB_PASSWORD` is set. ``` https://mcp.example.org/app/ ``` On a phone it is worth adding to the home screen — it has a manifest and opens standalone, which is the difference between "a page I have to find" and "the thing I open in a free period". **Notizen** is one screen: the day, `‹ ›` to move between days, and the editor. - Opening a day with no note yet **fills in that day's lessons from WebUntis** — numbered, with times, teacher and room, cancellations left out and substitutions marked. That is the whole reason the app is day-shaped: the one thing WebUntis knows and you should not have to retype. - **Stunden ergänzen** appears when the timetable has a lesson your note does not — a day you started writing before it ended, or a timetable that changed after you started. It appends what is missing and never touches what you wrote. - It **saves as you type** (a couple of seconds after you stop), when the app goes to the background, and when the phone locks. - Every keystroke also goes to the browser's local storage. If the connection drops mid-lesson you keep writing, and the next time the app loads that day it offers the version this device has. **A note taken in a lesson cannot be retaken**, which is the reasoning behind all of this. - If the note changed elsewhere since you opened it — the laptop, a sync tool, `add_note` — the save is refused and you are asked which version wins. It never silently overwrites. **Einstellungen** holds the Schulcloud token: how long it has left, and the box to paste a fresh `jwt` cookie into when it expires (the same thing `schulcloud token set` and the older `/token` page do). It also shows the index's state and the notes directory, and has the logout button. ### The login `WEB_PASSWORD` is the app's password — at least 12 characters, and a passphrase of three or four words is the right shape. It is hashed with scrypt at startup; the plain value is never stored, compared or logged. Logging in sets an `HttpOnly`, `SameSite=Strict` session cookie that lasts 30 days, so a lesson never starts with a login screen. The cookie opens `/api` — it *is* the user — but not `/mcp`, which no browser needs. Changing `WEB_PASSWORD` invalidates every session, because the signing key is derived from it. Failed logins are rate-limited per address; a password is guessable in a way a 32-character token is not, and this endpoint is on the internet. If `WEB_PASSWORD` is unset the app is not served at all — the same rule the `untis_*` and note tools follow. A login screen that no password can open is worse than no page, because it looks like a way in. ## The other four ways to write a note The app is not privileged; it writes the same files as everything else. ```bash # the command line, text piped in pbpaste | schulcloud note add --title "Subnetting" --subject LF07 # an editor, or anything else that writes files $EDITOR "$NOTES_DIR/2026/2026-09-18.md" # Claude, during or after the lesson # "halt fest: Gegenargument nicht vergessen, kam letztes Jahr dran" # → add_note, subject Deutsch, today's date # a folder you already sync — see below ``` `add_note` and `schulcloud note add` take `append`, which adds to the note already written **for that subject and that day** rather than starting a second one — so "note this down too" mid-lesson lands in the note that is already open, whatever its title. ## What may write, and where **The notes directory is the only thing this server writes to.** Not Schulcloud, not WebUntis — those stay read-only, strictly, and that has not changed. Every path component goes through `safeComponent` and the result through `resolveWithin`, the same two functions that stop a hostile Schulcloud filename escaping the file mirror, so a note titled `../../.ssh/authorized_keys` becomes a filename. `NOTES_READONLY=1` refuses writes entirely — right when the notes are synced in from somewhere else and should have exactly one writer. The app then still reads them, and says so rather than failing on save. ## Migrating out of Apple Notes Notes.app has no export. Its database is a Core Data store whose bodies are compressed protobuf and whose iCloud copy is encrypted, so scripting the app is not the clumsy route to your notes — it is the only one. **On the Mac**, from a checkout of this repo: ```bash osascript -l JavaScript scripts/export-apple-notes.js > notes.ndjson ``` The first run raises a macOS permission dialog ("Terminal wants access to Notes"); without it every note comes back empty. `--folder Deutsch` exports one Notes folder. Then look at what it would do, and do it: ```bash schulcloud note import notes.ndjson --dry-run schulcloud note import notes.ndjson # into the server schulcloud note import notes.ndjson --out ~/Notizen # or to a local folder first ``` ``` would import: 2026-09-15 · Deutsch · Erörterung Would import 84 of 91 note(s), skipped 5 with no text, 2 unreadable in Notes. ``` What it does with each note: - **The Notes folder becomes the subject** — its last segment, so `Schule/Deutsch` is `Deutsch`. Notes' own default folders (`Notizen`, `Recently Deleted`) are ignored rather than becoming a subject. `--subject LF07` overrides all of it. - **The creation date becomes the note's date**, because that is the day of the lesson. The modification date is whenever you last tidied it up, which is not a school day at all. - **The HTML becomes Markdown** — headings, lists, checklists, bold, italics and links survive; anything else keeps its words and loses its tag. - **Attachments do not come across.** A note that was a photo of the board imports as a line saying an attachment was there. Better than importing empty: you can see which notes still need the picture. - **Locked notes cannot be read at all** and are listed by name at the end. Unlock them in Notes and export again. Imported notes arrive as single-subject notes, not day notes, which is the shape they were written in. Both kinds coexist. Re-running the import creates second copies rather than overwriting, since the importer cannot tell an edited note from a new one with the same title. Import once, then keep writing in the new place. ## Reading them | Tool | Answers | |---|---| | `list_notes` | "what did I write down in Deutsch before the test" — by subject or date, lesson headings included | | `get_note` | one note in full, by the path everything else prints | | `search` | notes by their contents, per lesson, next to board text and the inside of PDFs | | `what_changed` | lessons and notes that appeared or were edited since a date | The `pruefungsvorbereitung`, `zusammenfassung` and `tagesvorbereitung` prompts consult them on their own, and are told to say when a note disagrees with the uploaded material rather than quietly preferring one. ## Deploying it Adding this to a server that is already running — the password, where the notes live, backups and rollback — is [DEPLOY-NOTES.md](DEPLOY-NOTES.md). ## Keeping them somewhere you already sync The notes are files, so any sync tool will do and the server does not need to know which. Bind-mount the folder instead of using the volume: ```yaml # docker-compose.yml, under schulcloud-mcp: volumes: - /home/pi/Notizen:/data/notes ``` Then point Syncthing, Nextcloud, an Obsidian vault or `git` at `/home/pi/Notizen`. New files are picked up by the next crawl; nothing has to be told about them, and the app edits the same files. Frontmatter is a small YAML subset — scalars and lists, in either the inline `[a, b]` or the indented `- item` form editors write — so an Obsidian vault round-trips. Unknown keys are kept and ignored. What the server reads out of a note: | Field | Falls back to | |---|---| | `title` | the first `# heading`, else the filename without its date | | `date` | a `YYYY-MM-DD` the **filename** starts with, else nothing | | `subject` | the first folder name — except a year, which is a filing scheme | | `tags` | none | | `courseId` | none — set it to tie a note to a Schulcloud course in `search` | `date` also accepts `15.09.2026`, and `fach:` works as a German spelling of `subject:`. **The file's modification time is never used as the date.** An import writes every note today; dating a year of lessons "today" would make the whole store useless for revision, which is most of what it is for. ## What the crawl does with them A **full** crawl reads the directory and indexes every note — one entry per lesson for a day note, one for the whole note otherwise, under the kind `note`. A **per-course** refresh leaves them alone, and the store carries the previous generation's rows forward, so a per-course crawl never looks like the notes were deleted. Notes are diffed by content, not by modification time, so a sync tool that rewrites a file byte-for-byte does not show up in `what_changed` as an edit.