Obsidian Publish Options
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?
- glob patterns (default config
- 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
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 (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
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)
- only requires
- 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
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
- 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
- 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)
⬇👎
MindStone
- 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
- 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
- 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)
Quartz
- Repo: https://github.com/jackyzha0/quartz
- Announcement: https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/onflb9/quartz_create_and_publish_your_obsidian_vault_for/
- Announcement date: Jul 2021
- Stars: 848 ⭐
- Still developed: YES
- Demo: https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/
Pros
- you can add code block titles
Cons
- again, you need to directly tweak CSS, no separation for future upgrades
Markbase
- Repo: https://github.com/markbaseteam/obsidian-markbase
- Stars: 13 ⭐
- Still developed: YES
- Demo: https://www.markbase.xyz/Home
Pros
- Obsidian plugin
- good looking callouts
- good looking tables
Cons
- there will be a paid option if you want to customize it (49/year)
obsidian-userland/publish
- Repo: https://github.com/obsidian-userland/publish
- Announcement: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/i-made-a-open-source-obsidian-publish-alternative/12407
- Stars: 176 ⭐
- Still developed: NO (the author switched to logseq)