How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare

    > This stack gives me full control: no subscriptions, no vendor lock-in,
    > and no risk of platforms disappearing or changing policies.

* Writing in obsidian

* Syncing files via git

* Publishing via nginx hosted on the cheapest possible vps (with https via let's encrypt)

Running a static blog is one of the easiest scenarios to self-host, because even if you get slashdotted, nginx should be able to handle all the requests even if you're host it on a potato

It's not free, but you can get a VPS for $20-$30 a year.

This isn't the best fit for everyone, but it seems weird to talk about "full control" and "no risk of platforms disappearing" when you're relying on the free tier of two external companies

Cool setup, but the choice of Obsidian is kind of weird in this context (in an interesting way, see next paragraph). Instead of opening a subfolder of the Hugo project in Obsidian, one could just open the entire thing in VSCode or a similar IDE, enjoy a good markdown editing experience, AND use git integration and the integrated terminal (and possibly set up automated tasks) to run your local testing and deployment workflows.

Note that Obsidian's markdown editing experience is _different_ from (but not necessarily better or worse than) what you'd get in a typical IDE. So while the choice seems weird to me, it absolutely makes sense if the author prefers the feature set that Obsidian offers. Being supported by so many different editors is one of markdown's strengths, after all, and this kind of editor-portability fits right in with the other parts of "Fully Owned" from the blog post.

Great stuff, looking forward to your next blog post in 1 year: “How I rebuilt my blog on…”

A fun hobby of mine is Googling “how I built this blog with [next.js/Gatsby/etc etc]” and going to page 10 of the Google results.

It’s just hundreds of developer blogs with no blog posts other than the ones announcing how the blog was built.

> … and no risk of platforms disappearing or changing policies.

Those risks still exist. GitHub and Cloudflare can do these things at any moment.

Back in the day, I just blogged by appending a text file, and then later an HTML file.

I had thought to do this same things. I am glad someone figured it out.

The one thing I do differently with Obsidian is that I use a private git repo rather than having it live in iCloud. I sync it across an iphone, ipad, and windows desktop.

I've started recently working on setting up the "special" public profile repository in GitHub to be my blog central and wanted to keep the files to a minimum. So, I really like using themes as modules in Hugo, then your blog repository will be just your content directory, go.mod, go.sum, hugo.toml, and any layouts you want to override or add.

    .
    ├── .devcontainer
    │   └── devcontainer.json
    ├── content
    │   └── posts
    │       ├── 1718983133-post-1.md
    │       ├── 1720321560-post-2.md
    │       └── 1740070985-post-3.md
    ├── go.mod
    ├── go.sum
    ├── hugo.toml
    └── README.md

Strikingly similar to mine, except Jekyll instead of Hugo. I don't even build it locally these days. So, Obsidian > Github > Cloudflare.

Jekyll is slow for large content (my blog is huge), Hugo is fast. But I want to stay as mobile and lean as possible. I've tried and with a few changes in the template, I can move from Jekyll to Hugo in a weekend. I've also tried to stay as decoupled as possible from any templating engine (Jekyll), and hence rely mostly on pure HTML + CSS, while Jekyll is used more as the task runner. All the posts are separated by "YYYY" as folders and none of the posts have frontmatter.

I can also move between Github Pages, CloudFlare Pages, Netlify, or Vercel within hours if not minutes by just pointing the DNS to the ones that I want. I did this when Github Pages went down quite a few times about 3 years ago.

I almost went Markdown > Pandoc + Make but not worth it right now.

VSCode has been good enough for markdown blogging for me. Hugo compiles pages on save so its quick to iterate. The markdown preview plugin brings same experience to misc markdown editing.

No new editors to learn and one gets instant access to copilot etc.

Or just use Obsidian Publish (and eliminate Huge, Github and Cloudflare)

https://obsidian.md/publish

> notes sync seamlessly across devices

Droobox and similar services have never been seamless for me with Obsidian. There will inevitably be some conflict when the same file gets edited on two machines, and an ugly conflict file will appear, with no easy way to resolve it without a specialized diff tool. Sometimes this conflict file will get unnoticed and a change will fall theough the cracks. Not a deal breaker - but not "seamless" either.

Very nice post!

I do almost the same, but instead I use Astro.

I use Obsidian, with a GitHub submodule for the content, and host it all as a static page. I wrote about that here if anyone is interested: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/obsidian-astro-submodule