Publish your Obsidian Vault for Free
An Alternative to the Expensive Obsidian Publish
Obsidian is a powerful software. But you can make it even more powerful by exporting your notes to the web.
The main solution to do this is Obsidian Publish. However, paying $20 a month just to export notes to the web is a bit expensive I think.
Fortunately, there’s an alternative.
Why Publishing your Notes?
There are many reasons why one would like to publish his notes on the web. Here are a few that I have in mind:
- Accessibility: By publishing your notes on the web, you can access them from anywhere and on any device, as long as you have an internet connection.
- Collaboration: Sharing your notes with others allows for collaboration and feedback on your ideas and work. You can even allow others to contribute to your vault.
- Backup: Publishing your notes on the web provides an additional backup of your important information in case of computer failure or loss.
- Organization: Having a web-based system for organizing your notes can help you better structure and organize your ideas and information.
- Discoverability: If you want to share your notes and knowledge with a wider audience, publishing them on the web can make them more discoverable and accessible to others.
- Credibility: By publishing your thoughts, ideas, and knowledge on the web, you can establish yourself as an expert in your field, which can help you to gain more credibility and build your personal brand.
- Inspiration: Reading other people’s notes and thoughts can be an excellent way to learn and get inspiration for your own work.
Obsidian Publish
Obsidian Publish is a way to publish your Obsidian vault without any effort.
It allows you to customize everything, from your site name to its logo, to its theme, etc… If you want some examples, you can find vaults on the Obsidian Publish page, or just by clicking here.
I won’t lie, Obsidian Publish is a very powerful tool. However, I find that it has some disadvantages:
- It’s quite expensive: $20 a month is a lot, just for a way to export your notes to the web. The web hosting is included, but it’s not worth it as you can get some for $10 a year, or even for free.
- It’s not open-source: this one isn’t a disadvantage for everyone, but for me, as a developer, I like to have control over the things I use. For example, plugins don’t work with Obsidian Publish. But with an open-source alternative, I can just tweak the code to make plugins work.
That’s why some alternatives exist.
Obsidian Digital Garden
Obsidian Digital Garden is a free open-source alternative to Obsidian Publish. There are also other alternatives, but that’s the one I use, and I think it’s the best, so I will share this one.
It allows you to make vaults looking like this (it’s mine and it’s not finished but I wanted to share an example for the article).
You can set it up in a few steps:
- You need a GitHub account.
- You need a Netlify account.
- Open this template repo and click on “Deploy to Netlify”. You can give your site any name you want.
- Follow the steps on Netlify.
- Create a GitHub access token. Go here -> Generate new token -> Give it a name, an expiration date, and choose the repo created before in “Repository access/Only select repositories” -> Repository permissions -> Contents: Read/Write -> Pull requests: Read/Write.
- Download the plugin “Digital Garden” in Obsidian.
- In the settings, fill in your GitHub username, the name of the repo with your notes which you created before, and paste the token you created in GitHub.
And that’s good! Now, to publish your first note:
- Create a new note
- Add the following at the top of this note:
---
dg-home: true
dg-publish: true
---The dg-home says that it’s the “Home” note of your published vault and the dg-publish says that the note should be published.
3. Press CTRL+P and execute the “Digital Garden: Publish single note” command.
4. Open your site’s URL which you can find on Netlify. Your vault should be online! If nothing shows, just wait a few minutes.
Documentation
If you want more info about the Digital Garden plugin, or if you can’t successfully publish your vault, you can check the plugin’s documentation!
Final Note
Publishing your vault only have advantages, even if you don’t want to share it with the public. Just for backup purposes, it’s a good idea.
Mine is published here, but I’m currently doing strong modifications to it. Indeed, initially, my vault was not made to be public, so I had to change a lot of things and also remove plugins because Digital Garden does not support plugins except Dataview.
Anyways, you can check it if you want some inspiration!
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