Gatsby Garden

Gatsby Garden lets you create a static HTML version of your markdown notes. You can convert your Obsidian Zettelkasten Notes into a public Digital Garden.

To see an example site built using Gatsby Garden, visit my Digital Garden

Features

• Support for wiki links - [[Note Name]]
• Graph visualization of linkages between notes
• Backlinks at the bottom of the note
• Tagging supported
• Sitemap, RSS Feed, Home Page generated automatically

Getting Started

Prerequisites

To use this tool, you’ll need node, npm and git installed on your system.

Installation

Once you have installed the necessary tools, you can create a new site using gatsby-garden using this command…

git clone https://github.com/binnyva/gatsby-garden my-garden

In this example, my-garden is the name of your site. You can test it using this command…

cd my-garden
npm install --legacy-peer-deps
npm run develop

If everything went fine, you should see gatsby-garden running in your browser at http://localhost:8000/.

Configuration

Once gatsby-garden has been installed, add your markdown notes to the _notes folder. Make sure you delete all the sample notes there first. If you are using Obsidian to create notes, you can set the _notes folder to be a shortcut/link to the Obsidian vault. If you don’t do that, you’ll have to copy over all the notes from the vault to the _notes folder everytime you want to make a static build of your notes.

Edit gatsby-config.js file and add your site details to the siteMetaData section. Few supported values are…

module.exports = {
  pathPrefix: `/notes`, // If your site has to be published at a non-root location, use this to specify the base folder. You'll see this in effect ONLY when you build the site with the 'gatsby build --prefix-paths' command. See <https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/how-to/previews-deploys-hosting/path-prefix/> for more details.
  siteMetadata: {
    title: `Website Name`,
    description: `Short Description about the website`,
    siteUrl: `https://yoursite.com/notes/`, // URL at which your site will be published
    headerMenu: [ // Top Navbar items
      {type: 'page', item: '', title: 'Home'}, // Type can be 'page', 'note', 'tag', 'text' or 'link'
      {type: 'page', item: 'sitemap', title: 'Sitemap'},
      {type: 'page', item: 'rss.xml', title: 'RSS'},
      {
        type: 'page', item: 'tags', title: 'Tags',
        menu: [ // Only one level depth, please.
          {type: 'tag',item: 'programming'},
          {type: 'tag',item: 'philosophy'},
          {type: 'tag',item: 'psychology'},
          {type: 'tag',item: 'rationality'},
        ]
      },
    ],

    menu: [ // This is the Table of Contents that comes in the home page if a homeNote is not specified. It can be much longer than the header menu.
    //   ... Same structure as headerMenu. You can have any depth level - multiple menus can be nested.
    ]
  },

Home Page Customization

If you want to set any note as your Home Note(the first page that shows up when you open the site), just give the home slug. You can do this by adding this to that note’s frontmatter…

slug: "home"

Building

Once you are done with the configuration, you can generate the static version of your site. Use this command to do it…

npm run build

PS: You’ll need to use gatsby build --prefix-paths if you are using a sub-directory for publishing your content.

Modifying

If you want to change something, edit the code in the src folder. You’ll need a bit of JavaScript knowledge to do this. To do this well, you’ll need to know how Gatsby works.

You can test your modifications using this command…

npm run develop

The Notes

The notes in the _notes folder have to be in markdown format. Ideally, in this format…

---
title: 'Zettelkasten'
tags: ['zettelkasten', 'pkm', 'notes', 'learning']
date: 2021-01-20 19:30:00
---

Zettelkasten is a note taking process and a [[knowledge management system]].

The top part(within the ---) is called frontmatter. Its the metadata about the note. This should be in YAML format. The following properties are supported…

• slug : This will show up in the URL of the note
• title : Title of the note. If not provided, uses the file name of the note
• date : Date the note was published.
• aliases : List of aliases of this note
• tags : List of tags that this note is tagged with.

Obsidian will create notes in this format.

Contributing

One of the reasons I built this tool is to learn Gatsby. If you know what Gatsby and want to help with this project, I’m more than excited to get some expert help :-D. If you are interested in helping out, go to the Contributing page.