Previous Solutions for Publishing Obsidian Files to the Web

Essays and updates on product, engineering, and AI by Chase Adams.

2 minute read

Info

If you're curious, here's how I currently publish Obsidian files to the web.

Previous Solutions

Publishing in Dropbox

Details: Publishing my website from Obsidian files with Dropbox

I use Obsidian sync to sync notes between my computer and phone and had my computer's vault live in Dropbox.

Why it didn't work for me:

The Dropbox sync turned out to be really buggy between Obsidian and Dropbox.
The Dropbox API authorization changed and I had to rewrite my fetch script
I didn't find that I needed to publish 'on the go' as much as I thought

Obsidian Publish

Setup Details: Using Fly.io and NGINX for Proxying Obsidian Publish

I tried Obsidian Publish but I found it lacked a lot of what I'd want out of it.

Why It didn't work for me:

The pages are rendered on the client rather than being rendered on the server, making them look less good when sharing on social media
Modification meant updating a JS and CSS file and re-publishing them. I don't mind this, but I want more control if I have that flexibility
I had to setup a reverse proxy to host my own domain. I know how to do that, but I don't want to own another piece of infrastructure.
If I moved a file, the old path would 404

Obsidian Publish ++

With this solution, I attempted to fetch the notes from the Obsidian Publish site files. This worked great for real-time publishing, having full control over look and feel and having the ability to server-side render.

Why it didn't work for me:

I couldn't justify the price tag of Obsidian Publish for a cached version of markdown files that I had to render on the fly
Latency was significant for note files
It's not a durable solution. If Obsidian changes the way they serve their files, it could break my notes quickly.

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Previous Solutions

Publishing in Dropbox

I use Obsidian sync to sync notes between my computer and phone and had my computer's vault live in Dropbox.

Why it didn't work for me:

The Dropbox sync turned out to be really buggy between Obsidian and Dropbox.

The Dropbox API authorization changed and I had to rewrite my fetch script

I didn't find that I needed to publish 'on the go' as much as I thought

Obsidian Publish

I tried Obsidian Publish but I found it lacked a lot of what I'd want out of it.

Why It didn't work for me:

The pages are rendered on the client rather than being rendered on the server, making them look less good when sharing on social media

Modification meant updating a JS and CSS file and re-publishing them. I don't mind this, but I want more control if I have that flexibility

I had to setup a reverse proxy to host my own domain. I know how to do that, but I don't want to own another piece of infrastructure.

If I moved a file, the old path would 404

Obsidian Publish ++

Why it didn't work for me:

I couldn't justify the price tag of Obsidian Publish for a cached version of markdown files that I had to render on the fly

Latency was significant for note files

It's not a durable solution. If Obsidian changes the way they serve their files, it could break my notes quickly.