Use Your Obsidian Vault

Already have an Obsidian Vault? Riebeckite can read that Vault as the site's content directory. Start locally first, publish one note, check links and images, then build dist/.

Before you start

You need:

• Node.js installed
• An existing Obsidian Vault
• At least one note you are comfortable publishing

Riebeckite does not need your Obsidian workspace settings. .obsidian/ is ignored automatically, so you do not need to delete it from your Vault.

1. Create a Riebeckite site

Create a site next to your Vault:

npx create-riebeckite my-site --preset starter
cd my-site

The starter preset already includes the Obsidian Markdown plugin used for WikiLinks, embeds, callouts, and tags.

2. Connect your Vault

Open riebeckite.config.ts and point content.directory at your Vault:

content: {
  directory: "../my-vault",
},

Change ../my-vault to the relative path from my-site to your Vault.

3. Choose what to publish

Riebeckite uses explicit publishing by default.

Add this frontmatter to a note you want to publish:

---
title: Hello
publish: true
tags:
  - example
aliases:
  - Hello note
---

What this means:

• publish: true makes the note routable and buildable.
• publish: false keeps the note out of the built site.
• Missing publish is treated as a draft in the default starter setup.

If a published note links to an unpublished note, the target page is not generated, and links to unpublished notes are not published as working site links — they render like broken links. Run riebeckite-diagnostics (from @riebeckite/plugin-diagnostics) to see publish-boundary warnings for these references.

4. Start Riebeckite

Install dependencies and run the check command:

npm install
npm exec riebeckite check

Then start the local preview:

npm exec riebeckite dev

Open the local URL printed in the terminal.

While the development server is running, saving a note in Obsidian is reflected on the next page view. Changing the publish setting is reflected the same way.

5. Check WikiLinks and images

These examples were verified with a fresh starter site and a small test Vault.

WikiLinks:

[[hello]]
[[hello|custom hello label]]
[[hello#Details|hello details]]
[[Hello note]]

Images in your Vault can be embedded with Obsidian syntax:

![[sample.png]]

Riebeckite resolves the image from the Vault and copies public referenced images into dist/ during build. You do not need to move images to a Riebeckite-only folder for this basic case.

Note embeds also work for published notes:

![[embedded]]

6. Build the site

When the local preview looks right, build the static site:

npm exec riebeckite build

The output is written to dist/.

What works from Obsidian?

Keep the Vault in another repository

The shortest path is to point content.directory at a local Vault folder. If you want to keep your Vault and site in separate GitHub repositories, use the separate content repository workflow instead.

See Content Repositories for the GitHub Actions setup.

Next steps

• Edit more notes and add publish: true only where needed
• Run npm exec riebeckite check after config changes
• Run npm exec riebeckite build before deployment
• Try Add Your First Plugin when you want more features