A Short Review of Linkwarden Bookmark Manager

And how to share to Linkwarden from Android

For a long time I've been looking for the holy grail of self-hosted bookmarking solutions. One that is easy to spin up and administer, has a nice web app, archives page content, and has a mobile app to share links to. There are a lot of options that are close, but I never found one that quite met my needs. Until recently, when I found Linkwarden.

Linkwarden was extremely easy to set up via Docker Compose. The UI is clean and beautiful, with both light and dark modes. It's very easy to add a link, categorize it, and tag it. Search works great as well. The only thing missing for me was a way to share links directly to it from Firefox on my Android phone. Sure, I can open it up in a PWA shortcut and copy-paste a link into it, but I'm too lazy for that. Well in comes HTTP Shortcuts, an app I found on F-Droid that lets you set up shortcuts for custom HTTP requests. Here's a quick tutorial on how to set it up.

First, install HTTP Request Shortcuts from F-Droid or Google Play Store. Open up the app and tap the '+' button, then choose to create a Regular HTTP Shortcut. Give it a name and a description, and then configure the following settings according to your specific Linkwarden instance. Be sure to set the Request URL to your Linkwarden instance URL. The {url} variable is one you'll need to create for the Request Body and set it to "JSON encode" and "Allow receiving Value from Share Dialog" in the Advanced Settings for the variable. For Authentication you'll need to get the Bearer Token from your logged-in Linkwarden session in your desktop web browser's developer tools. If you don't know how or where to get this, hit me up on Mastodon. After setting all of this up you'll see a new shortcut in your Android share dialog with the HTTP Shortcuts logo called "Send To...". You can share URLs to this to add them to your Linkwarden in the "Uncategorized" category.