Obsidian Publish Options

Some quotes from forums

I just need a way to view my notes online if I don’t have access to my own device.

I really want to be able to publish sites privately that are protected behind a login. (i.e. checks a list of users and passwords and only lets authenticated people load the site)

User management e.g (auth & permissions)

Summary

What others have (or plan to have) that we don't

graph view planned
Obsidian plugin planned
select the notes you want to publish planned
light/dark theme planned
has a simple GUI program we plan to have a CLI tool instead
- update site to latest template with a button will have CLI for that
backlinks support planned
transclusions planned
Excalidraw planned
image embedding planned
supports Obisidan community themes not planned, we're going to have our own themes
previews on hover planned
Andy's sliding windows
password protection
enable/disable some UI elements
sidebar with collapsable groups of notes (not just a list)
reader comments
Discord server
button "Share now" to share current page
page tags
walkthrough video on yt
PlantUML diagrams
page metadata (with e.g. date, tags)
you can add code block titles
publication center (?)

Open Publication Center: This command behaves the same as the ribbon icon. It will open the publication center where you can view a list what files are published, changed, deleted and not yet published.

RSS feed (?)
sitemap (?)
dataview queries (?)

What we have (or will have) that others don't

customizable layouts
- set per-page or per document type (e.g. blog, tutorial)
elegant website look
- not another Obsidian copy like all the above tools…
- beautiful custom themes
  - e.g. theme designed especially for blogs (e.g. tiles with latest blog posts on the fron page)
good docs, that can help people (even not developers) understand how the tool works and how to configure/customize it
CLI tool
expert team support
easy upgrades thanks to separation of default and user-defined config/components
- in most cases in order to customize the looks you have fork and tweak the source code

Other things to consider

Some people may already have a lot of notes they'd like to publish and at the moment, in order for a note to be accesible through the nav bar, you need to add it manually to the config.js which could be cumbersome.
- glob patterns (default config "*") to include and exclude files with URLs corresponding to folder structure by default?
- option to publish only specific contentlayer doc type?
- use first heading/file name by default and allow for chaning it using e.g. frontmatter/config file?
some graph solutions work very poorly with a large number of nodes

Options

Obsidian Publish

https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian+Publish/Introduction+to+Obsidian+Publish

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Pros

previews on hover
Andy's sliding windows
graph view
possible password protection
in form of Obsidian plugin
you can select the notes you want to publish (set in frontmatter)
you can toggle some UI elements like graph or sliding windows
sidebar with collapsable groups of notes (no nesting, only grouping)
light/dark theme
readers comments (planned feature)

Cons

costly ( $20/month or$ 198/year) and no self-hosting option
not very customizable: you can use community themes (same as for desktop app) and tweak them or create your own
not website-like look, just like an online version of Obsidian

obsidian-zola

Repo: https://githbutub.com/ppeetteerrs/obsidian-zola
Announcement: https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/s2vecw/a_quick_way_to_share_your_obsidian_pkm/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Announcement date: Jan 2022
Stars: 241 ⭐
Still developed: YES
Demo: https://peteryuen.netlify.app/
Stack: Python + some static CSS and JS

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Pros

one-file setup and very easy to publish on netlify:
- only requires netlify.toml (with content copied from their example) to be added to Obsidian vault (+ of course Netlify setup)
the above file also serves as a config file (see screenshot below), so you pass all the config as environtment variables (not sure what are benefits/drawbacks of this)
Fusion 360 embeds

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Cons

looks like Obsidian (on purpose, the author wanted to keep it simple)
you can only configure a few elements on the page (again, using netlify.toml, where you can even write some HTML strings, which is a bit weird…)

Perlite

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Repo: https://github.com/secure-77/Perlite
Announcement: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/perlite-publish-your-notes-to-your-own-web-server/21712
Announcement date: Jul 2021
Stars: 219 ⭐
Still developed: YES
Demo: https://perlite.secure77.de/?_ga=2.204892240.1108196096.1660504485-466175296.1660504485
Stack: PHP

Pros

has a Discord server with ~40 members

Cons

looks like Obsidian copy, but more geeky, raw
doesn't really allow for customizations
its PHP 😛
may not be obvious for people unfamiliar with PHP, docker or programming whatsoever how to run and configure this

Pubsidian

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Repo: https://github.com/yoursamlan/pubsidian
Announcement: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/pubsidian-free-and-elegant-obsidian-publish-alternative/21825
Announcement date: Jul 2021
Stars: 162 ⭐
Still developed: YES
Demo: https://yoursamlan.github.io/pubsidian/
Stack: python, vanilla JS (+D3.js)

Pros

has a simple GUI program (for Windows) that you can run inside the folder you want to publish; you can set the name and assets folder; it will convert your content dir to static siteoutput dir (HTML, JS) and drag and drop your output directory in netlify
search: full-text but also filename, tags
button "Share now" to share current page
flexibility to choose the notes to list in pubsidian

Cons

raw look, not website-like
menu is just an alphabetical list of all notes
you need to changenu is just an alphabetical list of all notes
graph can't handle too many nodes
if you want to set some tags or unpublish a noe you need to find it in a list of nodes (autogenerated)

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MindStone

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Repo: https://github.com/TuanManhCao/digital-garden
Announcement: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/a-free-open-source-obsidian-publish-alternative/36178
Announcement date: Apr 2020
Stars: 130 ⭐
Still developed: YES
Demo: https://mindstone.tuancao.me/
Stack: Next, React, D3

Pros

backlinks support
graph view
walkthrough video on yt
rather simple setup - its just npm (although in the docs it says you need to copy content/images over to the project)

Cons

not customizable
transclusion is not working yet
graph view doesn't work very well (reportedly)

Planned features

Obsidian, Notion, VSCode Plugin (maybe)
previews
Andy's sliding windows

Obsidian Digital Garden

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Repo: https://github.com/oleeskild/obsidian-digital-garden
Stars: 123 ⭐
Still developed: YES
Demo: https://notes.ole.dev/set-up-your-digital-garden/

Stack:

Pros

Obsidian plugin
transclusions
dataview queries (?)
PlantUML diagrams
Excalidraw embedding
Image embedding
supports applying any community obsidian theme
per-note settings with front-matter + global settings
publication center?

Open Publication Center: This command behaves the same as the ribbon icon. It will open the publication center where you can view a list what files are published, changed, deleted and not yet published.

you can "Update site to latest template" with a button

Cons

looks very geeky, raw
only customization you can make is to fork and tweak

Gatsby Garden

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Repo: https://github.com/binnyva/gatsby-garden/
Announcement: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/gatsby-garden/22054
Announcement date: Aug 2021
Stars: 90 ⭐
Still developed: YES
Demo: https://notes.binnyva.com/

Pros

RSS feed auto generated (?)
sitemap autogenerated (?)
page tags
some meta data of the page

Cons

customization: just some basic config options (site metadata, navbar) in a js config file; if you want to change the look or behavior you need to make changes directly to to source code (fork & tweak)