Expermenting with self-hosting TW, have questions

[Jody Kaplon]

I don't know how I never found TW previously, but I'm here after listening to the ChangeLog podcast episode #196 covering TW.
I've been hacking away with self-hosted CodeMirror to build a personal note-taking web app.
I was excited to see a CodeMirror plugin for TW...that means easy markdown highlighting and vim-keybindings for me :-).
I think TW will give me some nice UI-orgainization, so I'm giving it a try on my VPS.

After a few weeks of tinkering and research, I'm left with some confusion.
I thought the npm version of TW would come with offline browser sync built-in, but in my testing it seems like there must be connectivity back to the server to save a note, or it gets lost.
The Single-Page-App architecture and availability of an npm package made me think that by default offline changes in the browser would sync up to the server once the connection was restored (or that it could be achievable with the right plugins).
But my npm install of TW does not have the button to 'install more plugins'.
I found one tutorial that instructed me to drag a plugin link into the browser tab running my instance of TW and that worked, but it seems like a strange work-around.
Is that the normal way to install plugins to a self-hosted TW?

This image from the dev docs reinforced my assumption that offline browser sync would come built-in:
http://tiddlywiki.com/dev/images/Server%2520Architecture.svg

Are there a set of plugins I need to give TW the functionality in that diagram?
Is this even a good line of questioning given current state of TW?
This is a side-project for me and I don't want to be swimming upstream the whole time.
I've done some reading on service worker, is it a good time to try that w/TW?
What's the deal with the PouchDB plugin?
Has anyone explored git-based versioning in the browser or on the server?
Has anyone done Google Keep or Evernote importers?

Apologies for the big wall of text, I guess I built up a lot of questions while researching TW :-).

[Tobias Beer]

Hi Jody,

Anyone ever responded yet, somewhere?

The nature of your post has me think the user groups is the right place to ask most all your questions:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/tiddlywiki

Here's my five cents for now:

A lot of interesting questions ..but,

I would not make one big post out of it. 

Imagine the huge thread.
All the noise in a thread with a dozen "sub-threads" ...not my thing tbh.

Too much wandering and straying in that.

Chunk it up, helps to keep the discussion focused.

It's much simpler to ask and discuss one simple question,

even if that means about a dozen threads, one each.

(Also helps you to search and research existing posts beforehand).

I'm sure you've noticed already that for there to be a (rather basic) server to run,

you need to run TW off of nodejs.

Best wishes,

Tobias.