How I use Obsidian, Quartz, Git and Apache to publish these notes

#obsidian #quartz #digital-garden

How I use Obsidian, Quartz, Git and Apache to publish these notes

Key Points:

I wanted to collect the details of the process I use to publish these notes. Both for my future reference and to help anyone else who wants to try a similar approach.

I realize my website setup is not the same as everyone else. It is a common setup, and allows more hands-on control. I host this site through Dreamhost and have SSH access to my web server.

The setup may seem a bit daunting, but is very straightforward. And publishing notes to the website afterward is quite simple.

Assumptions

In making these notes, I’m going to make a few assumptions about the prerequisite knowledge needed, else this would have to be a much longer note.

Prerequisites

Along with the above knowledge assumptions, here are are a few setup prerequisites that I am not going to cover in these notes.

Steps Involved

This is a high level overview of the detailed steps following:

  1. Quartz installation, setup and configuration
  2. Obsidian vault setup and configuration
  3. Remote server setup
  4. Local Git repository setup
  5. Steps to publish new content
  6. Further Quartz customization
  7. Further Obsidian tips
  8. Final Notes

You can follow along in the Quartz documentation

Remote server setup

Here we are going to set up the remote Git repo and a hook to publish the website from the repo.

#!/bin/sh
git archive main | tar -x -C /home/user/demosite.com/

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ /$1.html [L,QSA]

Local Git repository setup

When Quartz publishes the static site, it does so to the ./public folder. However in doing so, it destroys and re-creates this folder. So that prevents us from putting a Git repository directly in the ./public folder.

#!/bin/sh
npx quartz build
rsync -a public/ quartz.demosite.com

#!/bin/sh
npx quartz build --serve

Steps to publish new content

If you have successfully completed all those setup steps, publishing new content is a breeze. I’m sure there are ways to better automate this process, but I don’t mind the flow for now.

---
  title: 
  draft: false
  description: 
  aliases: 
  tags: 
  date: 
---

Final Notes

There is a bit of setup work here, but it’s all pretty straightforward if you are comfortable setting up Git repositories, both local and remote. But you do all that once. The publish process is very streamlined, which is what you do over and over.

If you find any issues with these steps, have any questions or want to share your experiences, I would love to hear from you. Please message me.

Summary:

I wanted to collect the details of the process I use to publish these notes. Both for my future reference and to help anyone else who wants to try a similar approach.

Source: How I use Obsidian, Quartz, Git and Apache to publish these notes