On https://notes.andreasbackstrom.se, I have publicly published notes that originate from my Obsidian Vault. This is using Quartz to build a static site and GitHub Pages to host.
Problem
The problem with this approach is that the recommended way to use Quartz is to have a clone of the entire repository inside your Obsidian Vault, as your notes live in the content directory of the GitHub repository. This causes the Vault to explode in size with thousands of unnecessary files.
The proposed fix
I already have my notes synced to multiple devices with Syncthing - this enables me to have a server that receives my notes and process the necessary notes for publishing.
Export vault files
With obsidian-export we can look through our entire vault and export the notes that we want to have published. obsidian-export will be looking for notes that have the frontmatter property tags: published set.
These files will be saved to a separate directory.
NOTE
Due to this bug, obsidian-export (at least on Windows) cannot export files with tags correctly.
Containerized quartz repo
Having a docker container clone our GitHub repo, mount the directory containing all the exported markdown files and copy the markdown files into the content folder. Running npx quartz sync will push all the changed files to GitHub. The GitHub repo have an action that will build the site.
Actual implementation
When trying to implement the proposed fix above I quickly stumbled onto the first problem. As of writing obsidian-export version v23.12.0 has a bug that hinders me from exporting the files from the Vault and into the Quartz repository.
I therefor created a quick python script that will look inside my Vault, copy any .md files with the tags published and output them into the desired location.
Then the quartz repo can be synced up to GitHub where the site will build automatically.
This all runs on one of my servers with a cronjob for every day at midnight.
A bit hacky and not as elegant as the proposed solution but it works and that it what matters the most.