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Obsidian Public Knowledge Base

Public knowledge base built with Obsidian and deployed as a static site via MkDocs Material and GitHub Actions.

Repository: github.com/serg-markovich/obsidian-public
Live site: notes.serg-markovich.de

Problem

Obsidian is great for private note-taking, but sharing knowledge publicly requires a separate publishing workflow — without paying for Obsidian Publish.

Solution

A public subfolder of the Obsidian vault connected to a dedicated git repository. Every git push triggers GitHub Actions which builds a static site with MkDocs Material and deploys it to GitHub Pages under a custom subdomain.

Stack

Tool Role
Obsidian Writing environment
MkDocs Material Static site generator
GitHub Actions CI/CD — build and deploy on push
GitHub Pages Hosting
Cloudflare DNS — CNAME to github.io
Let's Encrypt SSL — auto via GitHub Pages

Architecture

~/obsidian/public/          ← git root (this repo)
├── .github/workflows/
│   └── deploy.yml          ← GitHub Actions pipeline
├── docs/                   ← all content here
│   ├── index.md
│   ├── azure/
│   ├── devops/
│   ├── homelab/
│   ├── portfolio/
│   └── til/
└── mkdocs.yml              ← site configuration

On every push to main:

  1. GitHub Actions installs mkdocs<2.0 and mkdocs-material
  2. Runs mkdocs gh-deploy --force
  3. Pushes built site to gh-pages branch
  4. GitHub Pages serves it at notes.serg-markovich.de

Key decisions

Separate repo from main vault — the public repo has its own git history, independent of private notes. Only content placed in docs/ is published.

MkDocs over Quartz — simpler setup, better Python ecosystem integration, no Node.js dependency.

Manual publishing workflow — no auto-commit on every Obsidian save. Each commit is intentional, resulting in a clean public git history visible to potential employers.

[!NOTE] This setup applies the DRY principle at the workflow level: one push triggers the entire build/deploy chain — no manual steps. IaC = DRY + TRIZ - How I Approach Infrastructure Problems