Setup

From nothing to a live site. Assumes Node 20+ and a GitHub account. Everything below is free.

1. Scaffold

npm create obsidiary@latest my-notes

It asks two things: a title, and whether your notes are a local folder or a GitHub repository. Either is fine — you can change it later in one line.

cd my-notes
npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:4321. The sample vault is there so the site isn't empty; delete it once you have your own notes.

2. Add your notes

Local folder. Put markdown in vault/. Point Obsidian at that folder and use it exactly as you normally would — Obsidiary re-reads it on every save.

Your existing vault. Copy it in, or replace vault/ with a symlink to it:

rm -rf vault && ln -s ~/Documents/MyVault vault

A repository. See Notes in their own repo.

3. Put it on GitHub

git init
git add -A
git commit -m "my notes site"
gh repo create my-notes --public --source=. --push

No gh? Create the repo on github.com and follow the instructions it gives you.

4. Deploy

Pick one — full walkthroughs in Deploying.

Cloudflare is the recommendation: unlimited bandwidth, free custom domains, no restriction on commercial use.

5. Keep it updated

npm update obsidiary @obsidiary/astro

That is the whole upgrade. Your notes and your config are yours; the engine is a dependency, so there is never a merge to resolve.

Configuration

Everything lives in astro.config.mjs:

obsidiary({
  vault: './vault',          // or: repo: 'you/notes'
  title: 'My Notes',
  description: '',
  explicitPublish: false,    // true → only notes with `publish: true`
  removeDrafts: true,        // drop `draft: true`
  ignore: ['private/'],      // folders to skip entirely
  base: '',                  // serve under a subpath, e.g. '/notes'
  live: false,               // add /live, which renders any public vault
})

What you get for free

Three routes are added without any wiring:

• /graph — the whole vault as a graph
• /search-index.json — powers ⌘K, fetched on first search only
• /vault-index.json — the entire parsed vault as data, for anything else