Obsidian Export is a CLI program and a Rust library to export an [Obsidian] vault to regular Markdown.
[[note]]-style references as well as ![[note]] file includes..export-ignore).Please note obsidian-export is not officially endorsed by the Obsidian team. It supports most but not all of Obsidian's Markdown flavor.
Binary releases for x86-64 processors are provided for Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems on a best-effort basis.
They are built with GitHub runners as part of the release workflow defined in .github/workflows/release.yml.
The resulting binaries can be downloaded from https://github.com/zoni/obsidian-export/releases
When binary releases are unavailable for your platform, or you do not trust the pre-built binaries, then obsidian-export can be compiled from source with relatively little effort. This is done through [Cargo], the official package manager for Rust, with the following steps:
Run: cargo install obsidian-export
It is expected that you successfully configured the PATH variable correctly while installing the Rust toolchain, as described under "Configuring the PATH environment variable" on https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install.
If you downloaded a pre-built binary, upgrade by downloading the latest version to replace the old one.
If you built from source, upgrade by running cargo install obsidian-export again.
The main interface of obsidian-export is the obsidian-export CLI command.
As a text interface, this must be run from a terminal or Windows PowerShell.
It is assumed that you have basic familiarity with command-line interfaces and that you set up your PATH correctly if you installed with cargo.
Running obsidian-export --version should print a version number rather than giving some kind of error.
If you downloaded a pre-built binary and didn't put it a location referenced by
PATH(for example, you put it inDownloads), you will need to provide the full path to the binary instead.For example
~/Downloads/obsidian-export --versionon Mac/Linux or~\Downloads\obsidian-export --versionon Windows (PowerShell).
In it's most basic form, obsidian-export takes just two mandatory arguments, a source and a destination:
sh
obsidian-export /path/to/my-obsidian-vault /path/to/exported-notes/
This will export all of the files from my-obsidian-vault to exported-notes, except for those listed in .export-ignore or .gitignore.
Note that the destination directory must exist, so you may need to create a new, empty directory first.
If you give it an existing directory, files under that directory may get overwritten.
It is also possible to export individual files:
````sh
obsidian-export my-obsidian-vault/some-note.md /tmp/export/
obsidian-export my-obsidian-vault/some-note.md /tmp/exported-note.md ````
Note that in this mode, obsidian-export sees some-note.md as being the only file that exists in your vault so references to other notes won't be resolved.
This is by design.
If you'd like to export a single note while resolving links or embeds to other areas in your vault then you should instead specify the root of your vault as the source, passing the file you'd like to export with --start-at, as described in the next section.
Using the --start-at argument, you can export just a subset of your vault.
Given the following vault structure:
my-obsidian-vault
├── Notes/
├── Books/
└── People/
This will export only the notes in the Books directory to exported-notes:
sh
obsidian-export my-obsidian-vault --start-at my-obsidian-vault/Books exported-notes
In this mode, all notes under the source (the first argument) are considered part of the vault so any references to these files will remain intact, even if they're not part of the exported notes.
At present, UTF-8 character encoding is assumed for all note text as well as filenames. All text and file handling performs lossy conversion to Unicode strings.
Use of non-UTF8 encodings may lead to issues like incorrect text replacement and failure to find linked notes. While this may change in the future, there are no plans to change this behavior in the short term.
By default, frontmatter is copied over "as-is".
Some static site generators are picky about frontmatter and require it to be present.
Some get tripped up when Markdown files don't have frontmatter but start with a list item or horizontal rule.
In these cases, --frontmatter=always can be used to insert an empty frontmatter entry.
To completely remove any frontmatter from exported notes, use --frontmatter=never.
By default, hidden files, patterns listed in .export-ignore as well as any files ignored by git (if your vault is part of a git repository) will be excluded from exports.
These options may be adjusted with --hidden, --ignore-file and --no-git if desired.
(See --help for more information).
Notes linking to ignored notes will be unlinked (they'll only include the link text). Embeds of ignored notes will be skipped entirely.
The syntax for .export-ignore files is identical to that of [gitignore] files.
Here's an example:
````
/private
testtest
!special.pdf ````
For more comprehensive documentation and examples, see the [gitignore] manpage.
It's possible to end up with "recursive embeds" when two notes embed each other.
This happens for example when a Note A.md contains ![[Note B]] but Note B.md also contains ![[Note A]].
By default, this will trigger an error and display the chain of notes which caused the recursion.
This behavior may be changed by specifying --no-recursive-embeds.
Using this mode, if a note is encountered for a second time while processing the original note, instead of embedding it again a link to the note is inserted instead to break the cycle.
The [Hugo] static site generator does not support relative links to files.
Instead, it expects you to link to other pages using the [ref and relref shortcodes].
As a result of this, notes that have been exported from Obsidian using obsidian-export do not work out of the box because Hugo doesn't resolve these links correctly.
[Markdown Render Hooks] (only supported using the default goldmark renderer) allow you to work around this issue however, making exported notes work with Hugo after a bit of one-time setup work.
Create the file layouts/_default/_markup/render-link.html with the following contents:
```` {{- $url := urls.Parse .Destination -}} {{- $scheme := $url.Scheme -}}
{{- /* whitespace stripped here to avoid trailing newline in rendered result caused by file EOL */ -}} ````
And layouts/_default/_markup/render-image.html for images:
```` {{- $url := urls.Parse .Destination -}} {{- $scheme := $url.Scheme -}}
{{- /* whitespace stripped here to avoid trailing newline in rendered result caused by file EOL */ -}} ````
With these hooks in place, links to both notes as well as file attachments should now work correctly.
Note: If you're using a theme which comes with it's own render hooks, you might need to do a little extra work, or customize the snippets above, to avoid conflicts with the hooks from your theme.
All of the functionality exposed by the obsidian-export CLI command is also accessible as a Rust library, exposed through the obsidian_export crate.
To get started, visit the library documentation on obsidianexport and obsidianexport::Exporter.
Hi there! Thank you so much for wanting to contribute to this project. I greatly appreciate any efforts people like you put into making obsidian-export better!
Managing an open-source project can take a lot of time and effort however. As this is a passion project which I maintain alongside my regular daytime job, I need to take some measures to safeguard my mental health and the enjoyment of this project.
This document aims to provide guidance which makes contributions easier by:
Obsidian-export is written in Rust, which is not the easiest of languages to master. If you'd like to contribute but you don't know Rust, check out Learn Rust for some suggestions of how to get started with the language. In general, I will do my best to support you and help you out, but understand my time for mentoring is highly limited.
To work on the codebase, you'll also need the Rust toolchain, including cargo, rustfmt and clippy.
The easiest way is to install Rust using rustup, which lets you install rustfmt and clippy using rustup component add rustfmt and rustup component add clippy respectively.
My intention is to keep the core of obsidian-export as limited and small as possible, avoiding changes to the core Exporter struct or any of its methods whenever possible.
This improves long-term maintainability and makes investigation of bugs simpler.
To keep the core of obsidian-export small while still supporting a wide range of use-cases, additional functionality should be pushed down into postprocessors as much as possible. You can see some examples of this in:
Code is formatted with rustfmt using the default options. In addition, all default clippy checks on the latest stable Rust compiler must also pass. Both of these are enforced through CI using GitHub actions.
💡 Tip: install pre-commit hooks
This codebase is set up with the pre-commit framework to automatically run the appropriate checks locally whenever you commit. Assuming you have pre-commit installed, all you need to do is run
pre-commit installonce to get this set up.
Following my advice on creating high-quality commits will make it easier for me to review changes. I don't insist on this, but pull requests which fail to adhere to these conventions are at risk of being squashed and having their commit messages rewritten when they are accepted.
In order to have confidence that your changes work as intended, as well as to avoid regressions when making changes in the future, I would like to see code accompanied by test cases.
At the moment, the test framework primary relies on high-level integration tests, all of which are defined in the tests directory. These rely on comparing Markdown notes before and after running an export. By studying some of the existing tests, you should be able to copy and adapt these for your own changes.
For an example of doing low-level unit tests, you can look at the end of frontmatter.rs.
I place a lot of value on good documentation and would encourage you to include updates to the docs with your changes. Changes or additions to public methods and attributes must come with proper documentation for a PR to be accepted.
Advice on writing Rust documentation can be found in:
Updates to the user guide/README instructions are also preferred, but optional. If you don't feel comfortable writing user documentation, I will be happy to guide you or do it for you.
⚠ Warning
If you update the README file, take note that you must edit the fragments in the docs directory as opposed to the README in the root of the repository, which is auto-generated.
Obsidian-export is dual-licensed under the [Apache 2.0] and the [MIT] licenses.
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this project by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.
Apply unicode normalization while resolving notes. [Nick Groenen]
The unicode standard allows for certain (visually) identical characters to be represented in different ways.
For example the character ä may be represented as a single combined codepoint "Latin Small Letter A with Diaeresis" (U+00E4) or by the combination of "Latin Small Letter A" (U+0061) followed by "Combining Diaeresis" (U+0308).
When encoded with UTF-8, these are represented as respectively the two bytes 0xC3 0xA4, and the three bytes 0x61 0xCC 0x88.
A user linking to notes with these characters in their titles would expect these two variants to link to the same file, given they are visually identical and have the exact same semantic meaning.
The unicode standard defines a method to deconstruct and normalize these forms, so that a byte comparison on the normalized forms of these variants ends up comparing the same thing. This is called Unicode Normalization, defined in Unicode® Standard Annex #15 (http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/).
The W3C Working Group has written an excellent explanation of the problems regarding string matching, and how unicode normalization helps with this process: https://www.w3.org/TR/charmod-norm/#unicodeNormalization
With this change, obsidian-export will perform unicode normalization (specifically the C (or NFC) normalization form) on all note titles while looking up link references, ensuring visually identical links are treated as being similar, even if they were encoded as different variants.
A special thanks to Hans Raaf (@oderwat) for reporting and helping track down this issue.
Pass context and events as mutable references to postprocessors. [Nick Groenen]
Instead of passing clones of context and the markdown tree to postprocessors, pass them a mutable reference which may be modified in-place.
This is a breaking change to the postprocessor implementation, changing both the input arguments as well as the return value:
````diff
With this change the postprocessor API becomes a little more ergonomic to use however, especially making the intent around return statements more clear.
Bumps regex from 1.6.0 to 1.7.0.
Bumps actions/checkout from 2 to 3.
Bumps actions/upload-artifact from 2 to 3.
Bumps thread_local from 1.1.3 to 1.1.4.
No need to depend on a third-party hook repository when each of these checks is easily defined and run through system commands.
This also allows us to actually run tests, which is current unsupported (https://github.com/doublify/pre-commit-rust/pull/19)
Bumps tempfile from 3.2.0 to 3.3.0.
Bumps pulldown-cmark-to-cmark from 7.1.0 to 7.1.1.
Bumps pulldown-cmark-to-cmark from 7.0.0 to 7.1.0.
Bumps pulldown-cmark-to-cmark from 6.0.4 to 7.0.0.
Bumps pathdiff from 0.2.0 to 0.2.1.
Bumps pulldown-cmark-to-cmark from 6.0.3 to 6.0.4.
Bumps pretty_assertions from 0.7.2 to 1.0.0.
Bumps serde_yaml from 0.8.20 to 0.8.21.
This was caught by a recently introduced clippy rule
Bumps serde_yaml from 0.8.17 to 0.8.19.
Bumps regex from 1.4.6 to 1.5.3.
Bumps pretty_assertions from 0.7.1 to 0.7.2.
Bumps regex from 1.4.5 to 1.4.6.
Postprocessing support. [Nick Groenen]
Add support for postprocessing of Markdown prior to writing converted notes to disk.
Postprocessors may be used when making use of Obsidian export as a Rust library to do the following:
Context, for example to change the destination
filename or update its Frontmatter.MarkdownEvents.For example, a future release might include functionality to make notes more suitable for the Hugo static site generator. This functionality would be implemented as a postprocessor that could be enabled through command-line flags.
Also percent-encode ? in filenames. [Nick Groenen]
A recent Obsidian update expanded the list of allowed characters in
filenames, which now includes ? as well. This needs to be
percent-encoded for proper links in static site generators like Hugo.
Bump pretty_assertions from 0.6.1 to 0.7.1. [dependabot[bot]]
Bumps pretty_assertions from 0.6.1 to 0.7.1.
Bump walkdir from 2.3.1 to 2.3.2. [dependabot[bot]]
Bumps walkdir from 2.3.1 to 2.3.2.
Bump regex from 1.4.3 to 1.4.5. [dependabot[bot]]
Bumps regex from 1.4.3 to 1.4.5.
--version flag. [Nick Groenen]Don't Box FilterFn in WalkOptions. [Nick Groenen]
Previously, filter_fn on the WalkOptions struct looked like:
pub filter_fn: Option<Box<&'static FilterFn>>,
This boxing was unneccesary and has been changed to:
pub filter_fn: Option<&'static FilterFn>,
This will only affect people who use obsidian-export as a library in other Rust programs, not users of the CLI.
For those library users, they no longer need to supply FilterFn
wrapped in a Box.
Recognize notes beginning with underscores. [Nick Groenen]
Notes with an underscore would fail to be recognized within Obsidian
[[_WikiLinks]] due to the assumption that the underlying Markdown
parser (pulldown_cmark) would emit the text between [[ and ]] as
a single event.
The note parser has now been rewritten to use a more reliable state machine which correctly recognizes this corner-case (and likely some others).
Support self-references. [Joshua Coles]
This ensures links to headings within the same note ([[#Heading]])
resolve correctly.
Avoid redundant "Release" in GitHub release titles. [Nick Groenen]
Add failing testcase for files with underscores. [Nick Groenen]
Add unit tests for display of ObsidianNoteReference. [Nick Groenen]
Add some unit tests for ObsidianNoteReference::from_str. [Nick Groenen]
Also run tests on pull requests. [Nick Groenen]
Apply clippy suggestions following rust 1.50.0. [Nick Groenen]
Fix infinite recursion bug with references to current file. [Joshua Coles]
Add tests for self-references. [Joshua Coles]
Note as there is no support for block references at the moment, the generated link goes nowhere, however it is to a reasonable ID
Bump tempfile from 3.1.0 to 3.2.0. [dependabot[bot]]
Bumps tempfile from 3.1.0 to 3.2.0.
Bump eyre from 0.6.3 to 0.6.5. [dependabot[bot]]
Bumps eyre from 0.6.3 to 0.6.5.
Bump regex from 1.4.2 to 1.4.3. [dependabot[bot]]
Bumps regex from 1.4.2 to 1.4.3.
Find uppercased notes when referenced with lowercase. [Nick Groenen]
This commit fixes a bug where, if a note contained uppercase characters
(for example Note.md) but was referred to using lowercase
([[note]]), that note would not be found.
Add --no-recursive-embeds to break infinite recursion cycles. [Nick Groenen]
It's possible to end up with "recursive embeds" when two notes embed
each other. This happens for example when a Note A.md contains
![[Note B]] but Note B.md also contains ![[Note A]].
By default, this will trigger an error and display the chain of notes which caused the recursion.
Using the new --no-recursive-embeds, if a note is encountered for a
second time while processing the original note, rather than embedding it
again a link to the note is inserted instead to break the cycle.
See also: https://github.com/zoni/obsidian-export/issues/1
Make walk options configurable on CLI. [Nick Groenen]
By default hidden files, patterns listed in .export-ignore as well as
any files ignored by git are excluded from exports. This behavior has
been made configurable on the CLI using the new flags --hidden,
--ignore-file and --no-git.
Support links referencing headings. [Nick Groenen]
Previously, links referencing a heading ([[note#heading]]) would just
link to the file name without including an anchor in the link target.
Now, such references will include an appropriate #anchor attribute.
Note that neither the original Markdown specification, nor the more recent CommonMark standard, specify how anchors should be constructed for a given heading.
There are also some differences between the various Markdown rendering implementations.
Obsidian-export uses the [slug] crate to generate anchors which should be compatible with most implementations, however your mileage may vary.
(For example, GitHub may leave a trailing - on anchors when headings
end with a smiley. The slug library, and thus obsidian-export, will
avoid such dangling dashes).
Support embeds referencing headings. [Nick Groenen]
Previously, partial embeds (![[note#heading]]) would always include
the entire file into the source note. Now, such embeds will only include
the contents of the referenced heading (and any subheadings).
Links and embeds of [arbitrary blocks] remains unsupported at this time.
Print warnings to stderr rather than stdout. [Nick Groenen]
Warning messages emitted when encountering broken links/references will now be printed to stderr as opposed to stdout.
Correct relative links within embedded notes. [Nick Groenen]
Links within an embedded note would point to other local resources relative to the filesystem location of the note being embedded.
When a note inside a different directory would embed such a note, these links would point to invalid locations.
Now these links are calculated relative to the top note, which ensures these links will point to the right path.
Report file tree when RecursionLimitExceeded is hit. [Nick Groenen]
This refactors the Context to maintain a list of all the files which have been processed so far in a chain of embeds. This information is then used to print a more helpful error message to users of the CLI when RecursionLimitExceeded is returned.
Add extra whitespace around multi-line warnings. [Nick Groenen]
This makes errors a bit easier to distinguish after a number of warnings has been printed.
Setup gitchangelog. [Nick Groenen]
This adds a changelog (CHANGES.md) which is automatically generated with [gitchangelog].
Allow custom filter function to be passed with WalkOptions. [Nick Groenen]
Re-export vault_contents and WalkOptions as pub from crate root. [Nick Groenen]
Run mdbook hook against README.md too. [Nick Groenen]
Update installation instructions. [Nick Groenen]
Installation no longer requires a git repository URL now that a crate is published.
Add MdBook generation script and precommit hook. [Nick Groenen]
Add more reliable non-ASCII tetscase. [Nick Groenen]
Create FUNDING.yml. [Nick Groenen]