salt.md

The open-source workspace for people and AI agents.
Docs, databases and realtime collaboration for your team. An MCP server sits in the same binary, so an agent works in that workspace instead of talking about it.

Website · Documentation · Quickstart · Agents · Live demo

An agent asks to organise the launch notes. A page appears, a database is
created, the rows fill in. A person opens the same board a second later and
carries on editing. Same pages, same permissions, same history.

That is the whole idea. Everything below is how it works.

Quickstart

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/saltmd/salt.md/main/install.sh | sh

No curl on the machine? A minimal server image often has wget instead, and
the script itself is happy with either:

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/saltmd/salt.md/main/install.sh | sh

That one command downloads the binary for your platform, installs it and starts
it, then prints the address to open. On a server it prints that machine's
address rather than localhost, which is the thing most install scripts get
wrong.

On a Linux server it installs a systemd service rather than leaving a process
in your terminal: it starts on boot, restarts after a crash, and your shell is
free. Running the same command later upgrades it. Everywhere else it runs in the
foreground, which is right for trying it out on a laptop. There is nothing
else to install. No database server, no cache, no object store, no separate
realtime service.

Docker, if you prefer:

docker run -d -p 8420:8420 -v salt-data:/data ghcr.io/saltmd/salt.md:latest

Why salt.md exists

Agents increasingly need somewhere to put durable, structured work. Not a chat
log, not a vector store, but pages and tables a person will read tomorrow.

Today they get one of two bad options. A workspace built for humans, with an AI
feature bolted to the side, which means the agent talks about the content
through a chat window. Or agent infrastructure with a decent API and no
interface a human being would willingly use.

salt.md is one workspace with two front doors. A block editor, databases and
realtime editing for people. An MCP endpoint for agents, on the same objects
and the same permission model. And you run the whole thing yourself.

What an agent can do

Connect any MCP client to /mcp and it gets 33 tools over the same
workspace you use:

• Read and write pages: create, update, move, duplicate, trash, restore
• Work with databases: create one, change its schema, add and query rows,
  configure views
• Search the whole workspace, with the same permission checks a person gets
• Import from a URL or a Notion export, in bulk
• Comment, and write to a page's append-only note trail
• Announce what it is working on, which shows live in the interface beside
  the page, so you can see an agent is mid-edit before you start typing

And a bounded set it cannot touch. An agent may not create or delete
accounts, change two-factor settings, issue API tokens, take or restore a
backup, alter instance settings, or change who is in a workspace. That list is
not a promise in a README. The server sends it to every agent that connects.

Full reference: MCP tools.

Agents get permissions, not a master key

A credential belongs to a person and carries that person's access, never more.
Beyond that:

• Every workspace decides for itself what agents may do there: anything they
  were granted, only signed-in connections, or nothing at all.
• Tokens narrow by scope and by workspace.
• Agent actions are attributable: the activity log distinguishes them from
  yours.
• Administration is deliberately out of reach of any token.

Giving an agent write access is only useful if you can still say who reached
what, and what changed. See Permissions.

And it is a real workspace

Not developer infrastructure with a login screen.

Write. A block editor with a slash menu, nested lists, checklists, quotes,
code, tables, images and callouts. Page links, backlinks, tags, covers and
icons. Comments in a side panel.

Organise. Turn any page into a collection with typed properties: text,
number, select, multi-select, date, person, checkbox, checklist, URL, relation,
rollup, formula and backrelation. Look at it as a table, board, list, gallery,
calendar, timeline or form. Filter, sort, group.

Together. Realtime editing with live cursors, comments, page history and an
activity log. Share a page publicly with an optional password and expiry.

Full-text search covers page text and the contents of uploaded PDFs, with
German stemming so Verträge finds Vertrag.

Architecture

   Claude · ChatGPT · Cursor · any MCP client
                     │
                    MCP
                     │
              ┌─────────────┐
   people ──▶ │   salt.md   │ ◀── REST API
    (browser) └─────────────┘     webhooks · ICS
                     │
            SQLite file + uploads

One Go process. CGO_ENABLED=0, so the binary is static and the SQLite driver
is pure Go. The frontend is embedded in it. Backing up is copying one file and
one directory.

No PostgreSQL, no Redis, no object store, no separate collaboration server.

Self-hosting

A desktop application for macOS is available too. It is a window onto a server
you run, not a second copy of the product. See
The desktop app.

Documentation

salt.md/wiki has 40 pages covering every screen, every
property type, every tool an agent can call and every setting on the server.

It is derived from this source and checked against it on every build. A tool
name that stopped existing, an API path that is not a route, a screenshot whose
component has changed: each one fails the build. Every page is also available
as plain Markdown at the same address with .md on the end, and
/wiki/llms.txt indexes them for agents.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Pull requests need a signed
CLA. CONTRIBUTING.md says what that means and why
it exists.

Security reports: [email protected], not a public issue. See
SECURITY.md.

License

The components salt.md is built on, and their licences in full:
THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md. A running instance serves
the same list at /licenses.

AGPL-3.0. Use it, run it at work, change it. If you offer it to
others over a network, publish your changes.