LifeLab is a digital journal that lives on your own server. It is designed to be the "operating system" for your life, combining the simplicity of a daily diary with the power of a personal (and literal) database.

Everything in lifelab is a block. A block can be a paragraph of text, a task to-do, an image, or even a piece of data.

Features

• Daily Journaling: You start your day in the Journal view.
• Organization: As you write, you can link the block to concepts (like Project or Person). LifeLab automatically creates these pages for you. Each page collects all linked blocks via backlinking
• Hierarchies: You can organize thoughts deeply using slash notation (e.g., Cooking/Recipes/Italian). LifeLab handles the structure so you don't have to manage folders.

LifeLab follows the philosophy of malleable software. This means you can customize and personalize it on your own. Through code blocks, you can automate your notebook. Imagine writing a block that automatically pulls in tomorrow's weather, show upcoming birthdays of your friends, or a task that reschedules itself if you don't finish it. You can script these interactions using Python or Rhai, turning your static notes into active assistants.

Collect anything

LifeLab includes a fully configurable API to capture moments wherever you are. You can send a quick photo via the Telegram bot while on a walk, or connect to AI tools via an MCP server. It all flows back into your daily journal. Since it is malleable software, you can setup lifelab to import from any data source, including obsidian, DayOne, or Notion.

Share your thoughts

Finally, LifeLab closes the loop by letting you publish. You can mark specific pages as "public," and LifeLab will export them as a static HTML website. This allows you to maintain your private journal and public blog in the exact same place.

(Fun fact: The article you are reading right now was written, formatted, and published entirely from inside LifeLab.)

LifeLab is a fusion of Jupyter notebook and Obsidian on top of Postgres. It is a self-hosted computational environment that reimagines the personal journal as a queryable data lake.

You are the data

Your journal is also your analysis dataset, becase both code and prose lie in the same database. You can write Python blocks that query the notebook itself. The API allows you to fetch, filter, and transform other notes programmatically. Furthermore, you can write explicit json data blocks to track aspects of our life with a stricly defined schema and aggregate them.

The platform was built to answer a specific question: What if my journal could read itself? Because the execution environment has direct access to the storage layer, you can build self-updating dashboards. For instance, I built a sentiment analysis pipeline that iterates through years of unstructured journal entries, computes rolling averages, and renders the results via Matplotlib directly in the daily view.

It no longer becomes a two step job to start a jupyter notebook, load your data sources and perform analysis. Everything is in one spot.