# [[Obsidian Publish]] #obsidian | _Created: 2025-05-30_ [[https://obsidian.md/publish|Publish]] is a paid hosting service from Obsidian. On a per vault basis, for a fee, they will automatically build and publish the vault on a website for you. It is expensive, but is a pretty well-integrated mechanism to automatically do an edit/publish cycle for your notes. ## Pricing >[!warning] Important to note, that unlike Sync, where you can pay a single price for all the vaults, in Obsidian Publish the pricing is *per vault*! As per today (May 2025), [the price](https://obsidian.md/pricing) for publishing one site is $96 USD annually ($8/mo). ## Setup [Setup](https://help.obsidian.md/publish/setup) requires: 1. Enabling the core publish plugin 2. Running the publish command, via the command pallete (there is no UI in settings.). - The first time, it will ask you for a _site-id_, which is a globally unique userid for the site, where the HTML will be published. This will determine the default HTML website. e.g. because I chose the wildly creative id of `sandipb`, the final published website was publish.obsidian.md/sandipb - If you already have some content in the vault, and don't want some content to end up online, add them to the _Exclude folder_ setting before you publish. ### Customization For customizing the theme, the user is expected to extract the CSS from a theme file and put it into a `publish.css` file at the root of the vault. The same goes for custom javascript, which goes into `publish.css`. Other similar customizations, like _favicons_ are provided in the [customization documentation](https://help.obsidian.md/publish/customize). Javascript snippets for Plausible and others are provided in [this page](https://help.obsidian.md/publish/analytics). ### Themes Publish specific themes are rare to find. I found a bunch of them based on the minimal theme here: https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-minimal-publish This site currently uses ## Features [[Obsidian Publish Custom Domain|Custom Domain]] ## Notes ### Filtering for publish Obsidian Publish will post all notes and images by default. It does give you an option to preview the changes to the site (updated notes, new notes, etc) before publishing. The selection of which notes to pick up for publishing follows these rules: 1. **Default behaviour** – Every note is published unless other rules say otherwise. 2. **Include folders** – If you list any _include_ folders, only notes inside those folders remain eligible. 3. **Exclude folders** – Anything inside an _exclude_ folder is never published; this rule outranks the _include_ list. 4. **`publish: true` override** – A note that carries the front-matter property `publish: true` is always published, even when it lives in an excluded folder. You will get a chance to preview and altering the selection before publishing. --- ```mermaid flowchart TD A[Start – note found] --> B{Property <code>publish</code> true?} B -- Yes --> P[Publish] B -- No --> C{Located in an<br>Exclude folder?} C -- Yes --> X[Do NOT publish] C -- No --> D{Have any<br>Include folders<br>been set?} D -- No --> P D -- Yes --> E{Located in an<br>Include folder?} E -- Yes --> P E -- No --> X ``` ### Fixing Mermaid diagrams overflowing From a [Discord reply](https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/768134314864017429/1333987514406535168), Mermaid diagrams getting cutoff horizontally may be fixed by this CSS snippet. ```css .mermaid { overflow-x: auto; white-space: nowrap; max-width: 100%; padding-bottom: 1rem; } ``` ### Moving notes without breaking old links Using the `alias` property, you can add hints to Publish for redirecting old note locations to the new one. [Doc](https://help.obsidian.md/publish/permalinks#Redirect+old+notes) ### Renaming page URL You can rename the URL for the note using the `permalink` property. [Doc](https://help.obsidian.md/publish/permalinks) ### Creating better social media cards - Use the `description` property for the short summary of the page. [Doc](https://help.obsidian.md/publish/social-share#Description) - Use `cover` property to an image in the vault (can't be external) - Alternatively use the `image` property which lets you use an external image. ## Limitations ### No community plugin support No Dataview support. ### No RSS Feeds There has been [a (now closed) feature request](https://forum.obsidian.md/t/rss-feed-for-obsidian-publish/18551/12) to add regular RSS feed to Publish websites, even endorsed by Kepano. But while there is a weird `/rss.xml` [feed without timestamps](https://forum.obsidian.md/t/rss-feed-for-obsidian-publish/18551/14), there is no feature today for RSS feeds --- [[Obsidian]]