This report evaluates the feasibility, pricing, and architectural options for self-hosting advanced features of Cal.com, Zotero, Neo4j, and Mermaid.js for the Cytognosis Foundation.
cal.cytognosis.org/{USER})
NEXT_PUBLIC_WEBAPP_URL=https://cal.cytognosis.org in our self-hosted instance, all user booking pages will automatically generate at cal.cytognosis.org/{username}. We can use Cloud DNS to point cal.cytognosis.org directly to the GCP instance we previously provisioned.@cytognosis.org Google Workspace calendar AND their personal Gmail calendar) to avoid double-bookings. There are no artificial limits on integrations in the open-source version.cal.com). cal.cytognosis.org in their mobile browser and selecting "Add to Home Screen," it behaves almost identically to a native app, complete with responsive mobile views and caching.Status — superseded. The original plan in this section (self-hosted Zotero data server + Drive for PDFs) was replaced after thefoxsen/zotero-selfhostimage was abandoned upstream and the maintained forks proved too thin to bet sovereignty on. The current architecture uses Zotero's free cloud for metadata-only sync (no PDFs ever leave Cytognosis-controlled storage) and Google DriveLibrary/Attachments/as the canonical PDF store. Annotations live in Drive-synced ISO 32000 in-PDF markup plus a self-hosted Hypothes.is instance for W3C Web Annotation. See../data-strategy/paper-library-architecture.mdfor the canonical architecture andlogseq_knowledge_architecture.mdfor the researcher-facing workflow.
The historical evaluation below is preserved for context.
zotero-dataserver (PHP/MySQL), zotero-web-library (Node.js), and zotero-connectors is notoriously complex. The community-maintained foxsen/zotero-selfhost image was the proposed packaging path; it has since been removed from Docker Hub.
Google Drive for storage — directly syncing Zotero's SQLite database to Drive will corrupt it. Original integration route:
1. Self-host the Zotero data server for metadata sync.
2. Disable Zotero's built-in file synchronization.
3. Create an organizational Drive Shared Drive (Cytognosis Literature).
4. Use ZotMoov or ZotFile to rename attachments and route them into Drive.
5. Result: metadata via the self-hosted server, PDFs via Drive.
This was abandoned in favor of the simpler architecture above.
| Feature | Community Edition (CE) | Enterprise Edition (EE) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Pricing | Free (GPLv3) | Contact Sales (Tiered Licensing) |
| Use Case | Prototyping, Single-instances, Internal tools | Production, High Availability, Org-wide analytics |
| Architecture | Single Instance only | Causal Clustering (High Availability / Scale-out) |
| Security | Basic Authentication | RBAC, LDAP / Active Directory Integration, SSO |
| Backups | Offline only | Hot/Online Backups, Point-in-time recovery |
| Performance | Standard | Parallel graph runtimes, highly optimized queries |
If you want to host Mermaid diagram generation locally to keep documentation data private:
Option A: Mermaid Live Editor (Self-Hosted IDE)mermaid-live-editor via a Docker container on Cloud Run or a VM. This provides an internal web interface (mermaid.cytognosis.org) where the team can collaboratively write and export diagrams in real-time.mermaid-cli or mermaid-server via a lightweight Docker container. This creates an internal API where you send it mermaid code and it returns an SVG or PNG image.mermaid.min.js script, and user browsers render the diagrams automatically on page load. cal.cytognosis.org to the external IP we provisioned and verify the PWA functionality on Android.
2. Neo4j / Zotero: Confirm which pieces you want to prioritize setting up in a dedicated Google Compute instance. Zotero requires substantial configuration time for the dataserver.