Samong 🧠

A local-first knowledge base for the notes already in your repositories

You solved it once and wrote it down. Six months later the note is still in the repo and you cannot find it. Point Samong at a project root and the .md files you would commit become searchable and linked — and readable by the AI tools you already work with. Plain Markdown, Obsidian-compatible ([[wikilink]] / [[wikilink|alias]]), no account, no cloud, one binary.

Why Samong

• 📁 A note is a .md file you would commit. Point it at a repository, not at a special notes folder. .gitignore is respected and dependency directories are always skipped, so a project root indexes your ADRs, runbooks and design docs without dragging in node_modules — and samong doctor tells you exactly what counted and what did not.
• 🤖 Your notes become an agent's memory. samong-mcp speaks MCP, so Claude Code and Claude Desktop search, read and write the same knowledge base you do. No pasting context back in every session (setup).
• 🗺 The graph is the workspace, not a novelty tab. A vault is a shape; typing dims everything that does not match, so a query becomes a place.
• 🔎 Notes are addressed by path, not by title. One repository holds twenty files called README.md. A title cannot tell them apart, and an index keyed on titles silently collapses them — so search results, the API and the MCP tools all carry the real path.
• 📚 Learn from documentation you never commit. .gitignore answers "what do I distribute?"; a knowledge base has to answer "what do I learn from?". scope.include pulls a dependency's own docs in as read-only reference notes — one project, one brain, no second vault.
• 🔗 One repository per vault, links across all of them. [[other-vault/note]] resolves across every registered vault, and backlinks come back the other way without any cross-vault index to keep in sync.
• 🧭 Ranked by relevance and connectedness. When the words cannot tell two notes apart, the one the rest of your notes point at comes first. Capped at a 25% boost, so a popular note never outranks one that plainly matches better.
• 🧠 Semantic search, optional and local. Build with --features semantic and run samong embed to rank by meaning as well as by words, with a multilingual model that never leaves your machine. Off by default on purpose: see below.
• ⚡ Fast, and yours. Link graph in redb, search in tantivy, incremental reindexing that only touches changed files. Every index lives in <vault>/.brain/ and can be rebuilt from the .md files at any time — there is nothing to lock you in.

Install

Four ways in, in the order that costs you least trouble.

1. A package manager

macOS and Linux — waanvar/homebrew-samong:

brew tap waanvar/samong
brew install samong

Windows — waanvar/scoop-samong:

scoop bucket add samong https://github.com/waanvar/scoop-samong
scoop install samong

Once the winget submission is accepted this becomes winget install Waanvar.Samong with nothing to add first, since winget ships with Windows. The manifests are in packaging/winget/ and CI installs from them on every push; the pull request to Microsoft is the only step left. If you are on Windows and want to avoid the SmartScreen warning below, this section is the answer — not the download links.

Arch Linux — paru -S samong-bin, once the package is submitted. Until then packaging/aur/ builds it: cd packaging/aur && makepkg -si.

No Gatekeeper prompt, no SmartScreen warning. Both fetch the archive themselves and verify it against the SHA-256 published beside it. Nothing arrives through a browser, so macOS never sets the com.apple.quarantine attribute it would otherwise refuse to open, and Windows has no download reputation to weigh. Each tap's CI installs on a real runner and asserts this rather than assuming it.

2. With Rust already installed

cargo install samong

Builds all four binaries with the web UI inside them; needs Rust 1.88 or newer. Compiling locally, there is likewise no download for either OS to object to.

3. Download and double-click

Download, extract, double-click:

No terminal, no configuration, no account. On the very first run it makes a vault at Documents/Samong with two notes in it, indexes them, and opens your browser. Everything after that is your own folder of Markdown files.

The ⏻ button in the top right stops it — the server outlives the browser tab, so closing the tab is not the same as quitting.

Already have notes somewhere? Use + Add vault… in the vault menu and point it at that folder. Nothing is moved or converted.

Two environment variables exist for the awkward cases, because a double-clicked program has no arguments: SAMONG_PORT when 3117-3128 are all taken by something that stays, and SAMONG_NO_OPEN=1 to start without a browser. If the launcher fails it writes ~/.config/samong/launcher.log and opens it.

4. Download the binaries and run them yourself

Grab one from Releases, extract, run. Direct links that always point at the newest release: Linux · Windows · macOS Apple Silicon · macOS Intel. No Rust or Node needed — the web UI is already inside the binary. Four platforms: x86_64-linux, x86_64-windows, aarch64-macos (Apple Silicon), x86_64-macos (Intel).

Verify what you downloaded against the .sha256 published beside it:

sha256sum -c samong-x86_64-linux.tar.gz.sha256

⚠️ Downloaded binaries are not code-signed

This applies to options 3 and 4 above — anything that arrives through a browser. A package manager and cargo install are unaffected: neither leaves a download for the OS to be suspicious of.

Samong has no code-signing certificate, so the OS gets in the way:

macOS — Gatekeeper refuses to open it (not merely a warning). Either right-click Samong.app → Open, which asks once, or clear the flag:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine Samong.app samong samong-server samong-mcp

Windows — SmartScreen warns and names the publisher as unknown; choose More info → Run anyway. The executables do carry an embedded icon and version information, so the dialog names Samong rather than a bare filename, but that is as far as it goes without a certificate.

Both happen to any open-source project without a paid certificate and are not a sign that something is wrong with the file — but do check the checksum above, and only download from the official Releases page.

Buying a certificate would not remove the Windows warning, which is worth saying because it looks like it should. A certificate replaces "Unknown publisher" with a name; the warning itself is driven by SmartScreen reputation, and since 2024 not even an EV certificate grants that on sight. Reputation is also tied to the certificate's thumbprint, so it resets when the certificate is renewed — at most every 459 days under the rules that took effect in February 2026.

Option 1 avoids all of this, today and for free. Scoop, Homebrew and winget fetch and verify the archive themselves, so there is no browser download for either OS to weigh.

Or build from source

Needs Rust (stable) and Node.js 20+ (Node only if you want the web UI, which is embedded into the binary at build time — without it you get the CLI + API).

git clone https://github.com/waanvar/samong.git
cd samong
cd web && npm install && npm run build   # build the web UI first (it gets embedded)
cd .. && cargo install --path .          # installs samong / samong-server / samong-mcp

Order matters: build the web UI before cargo build/cargo install — samong-server embeds the web UI into the binary, so it ships as a single file with no UI folder alongside it. (To build without installing, use cargo build --release; binaries land in target/release/.)

Update to the latest version later with samong update (see Updating below).

Quickstart

mkdir my-vault && cd my-vault
samong new "My First Note"         # create + index
samong vault add my-vault .        # register in ~/.config/samong
samong-server start               # opens http://127.0.0.1:3117 in your browser

samong-server start serves the embedded web UI and opens your browser — no UI files needed alongside it. Change the port with --port 8080, skip the browser with --no-open (the old samong-server --port 8080 form still works).