Obsidian Publish Alteranative

Obsidian Digital Garden: A Free, Feature-Packed Alternative to Obsidian Publish

Share your notes online with this simple digital garden tool 

Obsidian Publish is priced at $8/month on a yearly plan. It’s not a lot for most people. But for some, it is. 

If you are looking for a simple and easy way to publish your vault online, this article will guide you through every step. 

By the end of this article, you’ll have published your vault online in a similar fashion to Aaron Young, John Maverick, Andrew, and many others. 

Obsidian Digital Garden

There are a handful of alternatives to obsidian publish and not all of them are equally good. Quartz, Gatsby Garden, MKdocs Publisher, Flowershow, and Obsidian Zola, are just a few to name. 

Among all of them, Obsidian Digital Garden stands out in my eyes. 

In this article, I will guide you on how to publish your notes online with the Obsidian Digital Garden tool.

Why Obsidian Digital Garden?

This Obsidian publish alternative supports most of the Obsidian features like footnotes, highlights, links, local graphs, Global graphs, backlinks, code blocks, callouts, and more. 

It also offers support for plugins like dataview and Excalidraw. 

That’s a big plus point. Because most of the Obsidian Publish alternatives that I tried do not support plugins. 

Another great feature is that it supports theming. You can change the look and feel of your vault as you wish. 

Let’s dive into this article where I will guide you through the process of setting up an Obsidian Publish alternative.

Don’t miss any step.

Create a GitHub account

We need a GitHub account to connect our vault to Obsidian. If you don’t have one. Create from here

Also check: How to Effortlessly Backup Your Obsidian Vault with Git Plugin and Github

Create a Vercel Account

We’ll use Vercel in order to deploy our project and host it online. Use the GitHub account that you previously created to create a Vercel account. 

Deploy Obsidian Digital Garden

You have created a Vercel account. Now what? 

Go to this repository. 

Scroll to the bottom and click on deploy. 

This will take you to the Vercel account. Name your repository and make it private. 

It takes some time to deploy the project. Probably 15 to 30 seconds.

Once deployment is done, you’ll have a link to your empty online digital garden. 

image 9

There is nothing in your digital garden. How do you add your notes now?

Walk with me.

Obsidian Digital Garden Plugin

Go to your Obsidian vault install the Digital Garden plugin and go to the plugin’s options. 

image 1
image

Here are a few things that you need to do first.

  • Add your GitHub repo name(the one you created when deploying in Vercel)
  • GitHub username
  • GitHub Token

You can click on the given link and it will take you to the page to create GitHub Token. Choose the expiration date for the token. You can choose the ‘no expiration’ option if you don’t want the hassle of recreating it every time. 

Generate the token. Copy it. Add it to the plugin’s options. 

The plugin is configured. Now what?

Publishing Your Notes Online

With this plugin, you can’t publish your whole vault at once. You have to specify a property for each file for it to be published online.

I love this feature. Because it makes it easy to make a conscious decision about what you want to publish online. If you don’t want a note to publish note online, you are good. 

There are two properties you need to understand. 

  • dg-homepage: Sets a note as the homepage for our digital garden
  • dg-publish: publishes the note online. 

Both of these are checkbox property types. For example: If I add dg-publish and dg-homepage properties for a note to be true, it will be published online as a homepage. 

dg-publish: true
dg-home: true

Now, add a few notes with the dg-publish property true. Let’s push these notes online. 

They won’t be automatically synced. You do it manually. 

Open the command palette with the assigned hotkey(CTRL+P). Search digital garden. Choose “Digital Garden: Publish multiple notes”

image 8

Wait for 20–30 seconds before you see changes to your Vercel site. 

The notes are first pushed to the GitHub repository and Vercel deploys the repository again to update your site. 

Enable advanced options

By default, your online digital garden will not look good. You can enable advanced features from the plugin’s settings. 

image 2

Turn on the features you want on your side and when you push notes again, all changes will be synced.


That’s all. You have set up an Obsidian Publish alternative. One that is free to use and is feature-packed. 

Thank you for reading. If you use obsidian, you will love my tips from ObsidianNinja.

One comment

  1. After watching your YouTube video titled ‘How to Set Up a Digital Garden with Obsidian for Free,’ I found myself captivated by the concept and decided to explore your Digital Garden further. I must say, I’m impressed by the theme of your site. Your aesthetic choices truly enhance the browsing experience.Can you make an article or video tutorial from you detailing how to customise the site theme or template to achieve a similar level of visual appeal and functionality. I would love to see that.

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