Quartz Rsync Watch and Deploy

With this extremely handy name, I introduce to you a simple watcher, builder and deployer that uses Quartz to build static sites from your Obsidian vault and deploys them to a remote server using rsync.

At it's core this is a single docker service that runs a bash script to watch for changes in your mounted vault and builds and deploy html pages when it detects them.

Use Case

I want to be able to publish my Obsidian notes from all of my devices without any hassle. Since I already use Syncthing to keep my vaults in sync between devices and I have a server as an always-on hub for them, this tool is all I needed to fully automise the deployment of my notes. With this setup, whenever I edit a note on any of my devices, it gets:

- synced to my server via Syncthing,
- detected by this watcher,
- built into a html file by Quartz,
- and deployed to my webserver with rsync.

Usage

1. git clone this repository to your server.
2. Edit the docker-compose.yml file to your needs.
3. Edit the .env file to your needs.
4. Run docker-compose up -d to build and run the container in the background.

Volumes:

To edit the docker-compose.yml file to your needs:

• Mount your Obsidian vault to /quartz/content
• Mount your deploy ssh key to /root/.ssh/id_rsa

Environment Variables

Then set the following environment variables in the .env file:

• RSYNC_TARGET: The target to deploy to, for example user@server:/path/to/deploy
• DEBOUNCE_TIME: The time in seconds after the first change to wait before beginning the build. Default is 30 seconds.

Quartz Configuration

The Quartz configuration files quartz.config.ts and quartz.layout.ts are included in the /quartz-config folder and are mounted into the container. However, since this container is using inotify and only watches for changes in the /quartz/content directory and not Quartz's builder which does pick up changes to the configuration files, you will have to trigger a build manually by editing any of your notes.

Limitations

No know_hosts checking

The rsync command uses the -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no flag to bypass the known_hosts check. This can be a security risk and might enable MITM attacks. Please suggest a better way to handle this.

Stupid Debouncing, no locking

Obsidian uses an auto-save feature, which saves the note on almost every keystroke. To throttle the build process, the watcher uses a simple and stupid way of debouncing. After a first change is detected, it waits for DEBOUNCE_TIME seconds before it starts the build. Adjust this to your needs (e.g. the average time you edit a note before making a break). This is a rather crude approach and I am sure it might come to file locking problems, especially if you, like me, are using Syncthing or similar to sync your vault.

Stupid Check for Changes in the build folder

Sometimes you make changes to a draft note or a note that is excluded from the build in other ways. In that case it is not necessary to deploy using rsync. Therefore, before and after each build, the script decides if it should deploy by checking the size of the public folder. If the size stayed the same, it assumes no changes were made and does not deploy. This might miss changes in edge cases.