Quickstart

After installing and starting the container, open http://localhost:8080.

1. Create the first admin

The first time jabol boots with no admin account, the /signup route is open. Visit /signup, set an email + password, submit. As soon as one admin exists, /signup returns 404 — jabol is single-tenant by design.

You can skip the signup page entirely by setting both JABOL_ADMIN_EMAIL and JABOL_ADMIN_PASSWORD env vars on first boot. The admin is seeded automatically and you go straight to /login.

2. Sign in

/login accepts the credentials you just created. Sessions persist for 30 days by default (cookie-based, via better-auth).

3. Populate your links

You have three options:

Edit from the admin UI. Go to /admin, click “Add link” inside a category (there’s a starter “Welcome” category on first boot). The form takes a name, URL, optional iconify icon, tags, etc. Favicons and OG images auto-scrape from the URL.

Drag-drop a links.json. The admin page has a DropZone at the top of the Links section. Drop a full links.json to replace the canonical in one go.

Edit the JSON file directly. If you mounted links.json from the host, edit it in your favorite editor and save. jabol’s file watcher picks up the change and pushes it to every connected browser via SSE — no reload needed.

4. Visit the home page

Go back to /. Your links render as cards. Search with /, navigate with arrow keys, hit Enter to open. See Admin overview for everything you can configure from the UI.