Publish your Obsidian Vault using Quartz

This will take your private Obsidian vault repo, and publish it to GitHub pages using Quartz.

The current way that Quartz works is kind of odd. It requires you to have the full source code of Quartz in a git repository, then have your Vault within the content directory of Quartz. Odd.

I’ve built a GitHub action that obfuscates much of the setup of Quartz so all you’ll need for your GitHub pages repository is the quartz.config.ts file, along with the deploy.yml GitHub action

There are actually a few things that are needed for this to work.

1. Your Obsidian vault needs to notify the GitHub pages repo on push, which requires a Personal Access Token.
2. GitHub actions will run a quartz build on the GitHub Pages repo, requiring it to pull your vault, which requires a Deploy Key.
3. Quartz will then publish it’s output to GitHub Pages.

Choose your repo for hosting the GitHub pages content. I’m going to use my User github.io repository along with a CNAME file so my notes can be accessed via a custom URL.

Create a SSH Deploy Key

In your terminal, ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "[email protected]" No password, find the Public and Private keys in ~/.ssh/

Vault Repo

Add the Public key (.pub) as a Deploy Key

Your GitHub pages repo

Add the Private key as an Action Secret. (I called it OBSIDIANDEPLOYKEY)

Create an Access Token

This is needed for permission to run the Dispatch. Create a fine-grained PAT. Give it Actions Read & Write permissions on the Quartz repository.

Vault repo

Add the token as an Action Secret.

GitHub Pages repo

Add in the deploy.yml file. .github/workflows/deploy.yml

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://json.schemastore.org/github-workflow.json
 
name: Deploy Quartz site to Github Pages
 
# Run when there is a push to this repo, or a workflow dispatch from my vault repo
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
  workflow_dispatch:
 
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # Check out this repo
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
 
      # Setup node for this repo
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: lts
 
      # Checkout Quartz, putting it in the `quartz` subdirectory
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          repository: "jackyzha0/quartz"
          ref: v4.2.3
          path: quartz
 
      # npm ci on Quartz
      - name: Install Dependencies
        working-directory: ./quartz
        run: npm ci
 
      # Copy my Quartz Config file
      - name: Copy Quartz config
        run: cp quartz.config.ts quartz/
 
      # Checkout my Vault into quartz/content
      # If it's a private repo, make sure to add the deploy key
      - name: Checkout Obsidian repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          repository: ${{ secrets.VAULTREPO }}
          path: quartz/content
          ssh-key: ${{ secrets.NOTESPRIVATEKEY }}
 
      # Build the Quartz public folder
      - name: Build Quartz
        working-directory: ./quartz
        run: npx quartz build
 
      # Upload the Quartz public folder as an artifact
      - name: Upload artifact
        uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v3
        with:
          path: quartz/public
 
  publish:
    permissions:
      pages: write
      id-token: write
    needs: build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment:
      name: github-pages
      url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.page_url }}
    steps:
      # Deploy the Quartz public folder artifact
      - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
        id: deployment
        uses: actions/deploy-pages@v4

You should also put your quartz.config.ts file in the root of the repo

Vault repo

The only addition to the vault repo is the following file .github/workflows/dispatch.yml

name: Trigger Github Pages rebuild
 
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
 
jobs:
  trigger:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - run: |
          repo_owner="YOURGITHUBUSER"
          repo_name="YOURPAGESREPO"
          curl -L \
            -X POST \
            -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
            -H "Authorization: Bearer ${{ secrets.QUARTZDISPATCH }}" \
            -H "X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28" \
            https://api.github.com/repos/$repo_owner/$repo_name/actions/workflows/deploy.yml/dispatches \
            -d '{"ref":"master"}'

Finally

Commit the Github Pages repo first. It should build the Vault repo and publish to Github Pages. After a successful build, then commit the Vault repo. At this point, any Pushes to the Vault repo will trigger a dispatch to the Pages repo and built it.