GolemCore Brain is a self-hosted knowledge workspace for teams that want a clean web UI without giving up plain Markdown files.

It keeps docs, runbooks, notes, and project knowledge on disk as readable .md files, then adds the application layer teams need day to day: editing, navigation, search, assets, permissions, and optional LLM-powered workflows.

Most internal knowledge tools make teams choose between a good product experience and portable content. Brain is built for the middle ground: people work in a focused wiki, while the source of truth stays simple enough to back up, diff, move, and rebuild.

Use it for:

• team handbooks, runbooks, and operating procedures
• product and engineering documentation
• customer, project, or team-specific knowledge spaces
• Markdown notes that need a real browser-based workspace
• searchable context for internal tools and LLM workflows

• Markdown source of truth - pages are stored as local Markdown files instead of being locked inside a primary database.
• Organized spaces - keep teams, projects, customers, or environments separated in one running instance.
• Fast editing flow - create, edit, rename, move, copy, reorder, convert, and delete pages from the UI.
• Assets where the docs live - upload images and files, manage them from the page, and insert them into Markdown.
• Search that can be rebuilt - index title and body content from the files, with optional hybrid vector search when embeddings are configured.
• Roles and access control - use admin, editor, and viewer roles, public read-only mode, and API keys for programmatic access.
• LLM-ready workflows - configure model providers once, then use them for embedding indexing, space chat, and space-scoped Dynamic APIs.
• Agent-native editing - section-level PATCH with optimistic concurrency, atomic multi-page transactions, YAML frontmatter (tags, summary), a wiki link-graph summary, and automatic read-access tracking expose the Brain wiki as an LLM memory surface.
• Simple self-hosting - run a Spring Boot application with the frontend bundled into the same artifact.

Brain stores wiki content under data/wiki by default. Markdown files are the source of truth; search indexes and generated metadata are derived data.

data/wiki/
  spaces/
    <space-id>/
      index.md
      guides/
        index.md
        runbook.md
      .order.json
  .indexes/

A section is a directory with an index.md. A page is a standalone .md file. .order.json stores the order users set in the UI.

Build the backend and bundled frontend:

./mvnw package
java -jar target/golemcore-brain-*.jar

The app starts on http://localhost:8080.

To run the published container image with Docker Compose:

export BRAIN_ADMIN_PASSWORD='replace-this-password'
export BRAIN_JWT_SECRET="$(openssl rand -hex 32)"
docker compose up -d

The example docker-compose.yml stores wiki data in a named Docker volume and exposes the app on http://localhost:8080.

For frontend-only development:

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

The Vite dev server proxies /api to the backend on http://localhost:8080.

Set the initial admin account before the first run:

BRAIN_ADMIN_USERNAME=admin \
BRAIN_ADMIN_PASSWORD=change-me \
java -jar target/golemcore-brain-*.jar

For production, enable the prod profile and provide a strong JWT secret:

SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=prod \
BRAIN_ADMIN_USERNAME=admin \
BRAIN_ADMIN_PASSWORD=change-me \
BRAIN_JWT_SECRET=change-me-change-me-change-me-change-me \
java -jar target/golemcore-brain-*.jar

Common settings:

• BRAIN_STORAGE_ROOT - where wiki files and derived indexes are stored
• BRAIN_SITE_TITLE - product name shown in the UI
• BRAIN_PUBLIC_ACCESS - enables read-only public access when set to true
• BRAIN_SESSION_TTL_SECONDS - session lifetime
• BRAIN_DEFAULT_SPACE_SLUG and BRAIN_DEFAULT_SPACE_NAME - initial space identity

Use a session cookie from POST /api/auth/login or an API key with Authorization: Bearer <token>. Viewer access can read space content and search. Editor access can mutate pages, imports, and assets. Space admin access manages space-scoped automation. Global admin access manages spaces, global API keys, and reindex operations.

./mvnw test
cd frontend && npm run lint && npm run build

GolemCore Brain is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.