Obsidian to HTML converter

This is a short Python script to convert an Obsidian vault into a vault of HTML files, with the goal of publishing them as static files. It is heavily dependent on the excellent markdown2 by trentm, but also deals with some parsing and file handling that makes it compatible with Obsidian's flavor of Markdown.

Installation

Install obsidian-html by running:

sudo pip install git+https://github.com/kmaasrud/obsidian-html.git

Or doing the same (without the sudo) as an administrator on Windows.

Admin privileges is needed to ensure that the script is in the PATH. You can easily clone this repo and install the package locally with pip install . or python setup.py develop, if you do not want to install as admin.

Usage

obsidian-html will by default convert all the Markdown documents in the folder you're running it in, and place the HTML files in a directory called html. You might not want to run it directly in your vault or place the converted files in another directory. This is specified by this syntax:

obsidian-html <path to vault> -o <path to html files>

The script will only convert the files located directly in the directory specified and never work recursively. To specify subfolders, these must be supplied to the -d flag, like in this example:

obsidian-html <vault> -d "Daily notes" "Zettels"

Templates

The output is not very exiting from the get-go. It needs some style and structure. This is done by using a HTML template. A template must have the formatters {title} and {content} present. Their value should be obvious. The template file is supplied to obsidian-html by the -t flag, like this:

obsidian-html <vault> -t template.html

Here you can add metadata, link to CSS-files and add unified headers/footers to all the pages. Here's an example of how I use the template function on my own hosted vault.

TeX support via KaTeX

By loading KaTeX in the HTML template and initializing it with $ and $$ as delimiters, you will have TeX support on the exported documents.

Add this to the bottom of you template's body

<script defer src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.11.1/dist/katex.min.js" integrity="sha384-y23I5Q6l+B6vatafAwxRu/0oK/79VlbSz7Q9aiSZUvyWYIYsd+qj+o24G5ZU2zJz" crossorigin="anonymous"></script> <script defer src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.11.1/dist/contrib/auto-render.min.js" integrity="sha384-kWPLUVMOks5AQFrykwIup5lo0m3iMkkHrD0uJ4H5cjeGihAutqP0yW0J6dpFiVkI" crossorigin="anonymous"></script> <script> document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function () {{ renderMathInElement(document.body, {{ delimiters: [ {{left: "$$", right: "$$", display: true}}, {{left: "\\[", right: "\\]", display: true}}, {{left: "$", right: "$", display: false}}, {{left: "\\(", right: "\\)", display: false}} ] }}); }}); </script>

Syntax highlighting of code blocks

Using highlight.js, syntax highlighting is easily achieved.

Just add this to the bottom of you template's body

<script src="//cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/highlightjs/cdn-release@10.1.2/build/highlight.min.js"></script> <script>hljs.initHighlightingOnLoad();</script>

Deploying vault with GitHub Actions

Make a GitHub Actions workflow using the YAML below, and your vault will be published to GitHub Pages every time you push to the repository.

1. Make sure you have GitHub Pages set up in the vault, and that it has gh-pages /root as its source.

2. Modify the following YAML job to match your repository.

   name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
   
   on:
     push:
       branches: [ master ]
     
   jobs:
     deploy:
       runs-on: ubuntu-latest
   
       steps:
       - uses: actions/checkout@v2
   
       - name: Set up Python 3.8
         uses: actions/setup-python@v2
         with:
           python-version: 3.8
   
     - name: Install obsidian-html
       run: |
         python -m pip install --upgrade pip
         pip install git+https://github.com/kmaasrud/obsidian-html.git
         
     - name: Generate HTML through obsidian-html
       run: obsidian-html ./vault -o ./out -t ./template.html -d daily
   
     - name: Deploy
       uses: s0/git-publish-subdir-action@develop
       env:
         REPO: self
         BRANCH: gh-pages
         FOLDER: out
         GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

To do

• Support local attachments
• Support the ![[]] embedding syntax (perhaps using iframe or some similar method)
• Support extra features added by the user through YAML metadata

Known issues

• Links in headers lead to weird header ids, and thus malfunctioning header links from other pages.