Obsidian Digital Garden

The Digital Garden publishing process preserves header link information. This includes:

• Standard links to headers in other files: [[Filename#Header]].
• Embeds (transclusions) of headers: ![[Filename#Header]].
• Links to headers containing special characters (e.g., colons).
• Internal links to headers within the same file: [[#Header]].
• Internal links with custom display text: [[#Header|custom text]].

[[000 Home#Welcome]]
![[02 Header with special character#A header With a colon]]
[[#Some Header]]
[[#Some Header|custom display]]

Excalidraw files in this ecosystem are Markdown files that contain a frontmatter block with excalidraw-plugin: parsed and a JSON block representing the drawing data. The JSON block contains elements (rectangles, text, arrows, lines, etc.) and appState (theme, background color, current tool settings).

{
	"type": "excalidraw",
	"version": 2,
	"elements": [
		{
			"id": "CZsgDfedEqsrXkSK9gQJH",
			"type": "rectangle",
			"x": -231.33984375,
			"y": -252.75,
			"width": 222,
			"height": 93.296875,
			"strokeColor": "#1e1e1e",
			"backgroundColor": "transparent",
			"fillStyle": "hachure"
		}
	],
	"appState": {
		"theme": "light",
		"viewBackgroundColor": "#ffffff"
	}
}

When using the cards view type in a .base file, you can specify which property to use for the card's cover image using the image key. The plugin supports three primary ways to reference images:

1. Obsidian Syntax (note.property): Used when you want to pull an image from a specific property of the linked note (e.g., image: note.cover). This is the standard format generated by the Obsidian UI.
2. Bare Property Name (property): Used to reference a property directly on the file being viewed (e.g., image: cover).
3. External/Hotlinked: Images can also be provided via external URLs within the property value.

Note: For wikilink covers to work, ensure the property contains a valid wikilink to an image file.

views:
  - type: cards
    name: Covers obsidian syntax
    image: note.cover

You can generate a snapshot of the garden compilation to facilitate snapshot testing. This can be done in two ways:

1. Run the Generate Garden Snapshot command from the Obsidian command palette.
2. The snapshot generation process also runs automatically when the plugin loads.

To designate a specific note as the entry point or home page of your digital garden, add the dg-home: true flag to its YAML frontmatter. This should only be added to one note in your entire garden.

---
dg-home: true
dg-publish: true
---

For a managed, non-technical setup that avoids GitHub and Vercel:

1. Create an account at forestry.md.
2. Obtain your Garden Key from the Forestry.md dashboard.
3. In Obsidian, open the Digital Garden settings and enter the key in the Forestry.md section.
4. Publish notes directly from Obsidian.

If you want to preview your garden locally or self-host it, you can export your published notes to a local directory:

1. In the plugin settings, locate Local Export and set the path to your local digitalgarden folder.
2. Open the Command Palette and run Export Garden to Local Folder.
3. Navigate to your digitalgarden folder in a terminal and run npm run dev to start a local development server.

Note: Local export performs a full export each time and does not support publish status tracking or diffing.

To develop the plugin locally using the provided testing vault (src/dg-testVault), follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository.
2. Use a node version manager to ensure compatibility: nvm install && nvm use.
3. Install dependencies: npm install.
4. Run the development environment: npm run dev.
5. Open the vault located at src/dg-testVault in Obsidian.

If you wish to develop using a different vault, move the plugin into that vault's .obsidian/plugins folder.

To use the test vault with GitHub, create a .env file with the following keys:

GITHUB_REPO=
GITHUB_TOKEN=
GITHUB_USERNAME=

# Forestry.md settings (if you're using Forestry.md)
FORESTRY_BASE_URL=https://api.forestry.md/app
FORESTRY_PAGE_NAME=
FORESTRY_API_KEY=

# Local export (for development or self-hosting)
LOCAL_GARDEN_PATH=../digitalgarden