How to set-up you own wiki with Obsidian and Quartz

This tutorial will help you set-up a static site (like this one) based on Obsidian and Quartz that is managed as follows

1. [local] you edit your pages locally using obsidian and markdown
2. [local] sync the changes with rsync on the server
3. [vps] quartz watches for changes and updates your static site

It looks like this

requirements

The only requirement is a server with docker installed that will build and serve your site

---

Setting up the server

You need a directory with the following files

• docker-compose.yml - will run a nginx and a quartz container
• default.conf - a config for nginx
• vault/ - contains the obsidian vault with all source markdown files (a vault is a collection of markdown files)
• public/ - will contain the generated static site
• (optional) quartz.config.ts - in case you wanna change the way the site is generated, see it on github

Here are the sources

docker-compose.yml

services:
  web:
    restart: always
    image: nginx
    volumes:
    - ./public:/var/www/html/
    - ./default.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
    ports:
    # expose nginx on the internet
    - "80:8081"
 
  quartz:
    restart: always
    image: quartz
    hostname: quartz
    volumes:
    - ./vault:/usr/src/app/content
    - ./public:/usr/src/app/public
    - ./quartz.config.ts:/usr/src/app/quartz.config.ts
 

default.conf

server {
    listen 8081;
    server_name yourdomain.com;
    root /var/www/html/;
    index index.html;
    error_page 404 /404.html;
 
    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ =404;
    }
}

TLS / HTTPS

This config doesn’t set-up certificates for the web server. I personally let Cloudflare take care of them

Build the docker image for quartz before starting the server

cd tmp
git cline --depth 1 https://github.com/jackyzha0/quartz.git
cd quartz
docker build -t quartz .

Run the server with docker compose up in a screen/tmux so you can see potential errors

---

Local set-up

Now that the server is running, you need to create a new obsidian vault that will hold your site sources, and create a new entry named index, which will serve as the landing page e.g.

---
title: Home
draft: false
 
---
 
yep!
The rest of your content lives here. You can use Markdown here :)
 

Make sure the the index page is named exactly like that

I don't use the following script anymore to sync vaults, I just mount the vault with sshfs

Create a script that will sync your local vault with the server. The two rsync commands allows you to sync both ways, which is useful for example when you edit from multiple computers, but be aware that it doesn’t work for deleted files

TODO: find a solution for deleted files

#!/bin/bash
 
LOCAL="vault/"
REMOTE="user@[ip]:/path/to/vault/"
 
rsync -auzP $LOCAL $REMOTE
rsync -auzP $REMOTE $LOCAL

Once you run the script your site should be already updated by the quartz service. If it didn’t, check the docker logs

You can change your site's title, color scheme and fonts by editing quartz.config.ts

💜