Migrating Notes from Obsidian Quartz to Obsidian Publish, Seamlessly Integrated with Netlify

It’s no secret that I am a very big fan of Obsidian. I use it for everything from note-taking to project management, and even as a publishing platform for my notes. In order to publish notes on the web, Obsidian offers Obsidian Publish, a service that allows you to host your notes as a static website. However, I had been using Obsidian Quartz for my publishing needs. I liked it primarily because it was free and open source, and I could host it myself on GitHub Pages. However, I found that the publishing workflow was a bit cumbersome. So I finally decided to migrate my notes from Obsidian Quartz to Obsidian Publish, while still keeping them under my main website (dandylyons.net) using Netlify as a proxy.

This post will walk through the migration process, the technical details of integrating Obsidian Publish with my existing Hugo site, and the key considerations for SEO and user experience.

Choosing Obsidian Publish: Quartz vs. Publish

Understanding the difference between Obsidian Quartz and Obsidian Publish is key to appreciating the migration path. Both take an Obsidian vault as input and produce a static website, but their architecture and hosting differ significantly.

Pros and Cons

For my notes, the ‘zero-friction’ publishing directly from Obsidian and the managed hosting of Obsidian Publish became more appealing, justifying the shift despite Quartz’s strengths as a free solution. But these benefits have been true for a while now. So what caused me to finally make the switch? Bases. I have been waiting for the Obsidian team to release a database solution for Obsidian for a very long time, and I was stoked to see that they finally did. Even better, they announced in their roadmap that Obsidian Publish would support Bases in the future. As much as I like and appreciate Obsidian Quartz, I doubt that a third-party community project will ever be able to match the level of integration and support that Obsidian Publish will provide for Bases. This will certainly be a game-changer for my notes, and I wanted to be ready for it. So I decided to migrate my notes from Obsidian Quartz to Obsidian Publish.

The Migration Strategy: Netlify as the Integration Layer

Obsidian has very helpful documentation showing how to set up Obsidian Publish with a custom domain, which I used for this migration.

My main website (dandylyons.net), built with Hugo, was already hosted on Netlify. The challenge was to move the notes content to the Obsidian Publish service while still having it appear as part of dandylyons.net under the /notes/ path.

Once again Netlify’s redirect engine is the key here. It allows Netlify to act as a proxy. When a user requests a URL under dandylyons.net/notes/, Netlify intercepts the request and internally fetches the corresponding content from the Obsidian Publish hosted site, serving it back to the user as if it originated from dandylyons.net.

This setup is ideal:

• My main Hugo site handles all requests except those starting with /notes/.
• Obsidian Publish generates and hosts the notes content.
• Netlify bridges the two, presenting the notes content under the desired dandylyons.net/notes/ path.
• When a user requests a URL under dandylyons.net/notes/, Netlify intercepts the request and fetches the corresponding content from the Obsidian Publish hosted site, serving it back to the user as if it originated from dandylyons.net.

Implementing the Proxy with netlify.toml

To configure redirects on Netlify, you must provide a netlify.toml file in the root of your project, with the desired configuration. My Netlify project for dandylyons.net already had a netlify.toml file managing the Hugo build which contained an outdated redirect rule pointing /notes/* to my old GitHub Pages hosted Quartz site. This rule needed to be replaced with the new proxy rule for Obsidian Publish.

Here is the relevant section of the updated netlify.toml:

[build.environment]
HUGO_VERSION = "0.134.0" # Set this to your Hugo version

[[redirects]]
  from = "/notes/*"
  to = "https://publish.obsidian.md/serve?url=dandylyons.net/notes/:splat"
  status = 200 # Crucially, status 200 creates a proxy/rewrite, not a redirect
  force = true # Ensures this rule takes precedence

# This was my old redirect rule, which is now commented out
# [[redirects]]
#   from = "/notes/*"
# to = "https://dandylyons.github.io/notes/:splat" # Old URL
# status = 301
# force = true

How the Proxy Rule Works (status = 200)

When a browser requests https://dandylyons.net/notes/some-page:

1. The request arrives at Netlify for dandylyons.net.
2. Netlify matches the /notes/* path to the [[redirects]] rule.
3. Because status = 200, Netlify does not tell the browser to go to a new URL.
4. Instead, Netlify makes a server-side request to the to URL: https://publish.obsidian.md/serve?url=dandylyons.net/notes/some-page (where :splat was replaced by some-page).
5. Obsidian Publish receives this request, identifies the site based on dandylyons.net/notes, finds the “some-page” content, and returns it to Netlify.
6. Netlify then delivers that content back to the user’s browser, seemingly originating from https://dandylyons.net/notes/some-page.

The URL in the browser’s address bar remains https://dandylyons.net/notes/some-page. This is exactly the desired behavior for integrating content under a subpath.

Configuring Obsidian Publish & Updating Hugo

With the Netlify proxy configured, the final steps involve setting up Obsidian Publish and adjusting the main Hugo site:

1. Configure Custom Domain in Obsidian Publish: Within your Obsidian vault, access the Publish settings. Under the Custom domain option, enter dandylyons.net/notes as the custom URL for your published site. This setting is essential for Obsidian Publish to correctly interpret the requests arriving via the Netlify proxy.
2. Update Hugo Site Links: Modify your Hugo project’s config.toml and any markdown files. Change any links that pointed to your old Quartz site URL (e.g., https://dandylyons.github.io/notes/...) to now point to the new internal path /notes/.... This includes updating the “Notes” menu item in your site’s navigation.

Key SEO Considerations

Migrating content from one hosting/generating method to another, especially involving a proxy, requires careful attention to SEO to preserve search rankings and user experience. Thankfully, Obsidian Publish also provides some built-in SEO features and an SEO guide. Here are some of the key SEO features provided by Obsidian Publish:

• Sitemap: Obsidian Publish can automatically generate a sitemap.xml for you
• Robots.txt: Obsidian Publish can automatically generate a robots.txt file for you
• RSS: Obsidian Publish can automatically generate an RSS feed for you

Here are some additional SEO considerations to ensure a smooth transition:

• Internal Linking: Update all internal links within your main Hugo site (/posts/, /projects/, etc.) to correctly point to the new /notes/ paths. This is fundamental for SEO, helping search engines discover the migrated content’s new location and pass link authority.
• External Backlinks: Identify any valuable external links pointing to your old Quartz site’s URL (e.g., https://dandylyons.github.io/notes/...). While you could try basic redirects on the old host (if possible), the most effective long-term strategy for important backlinks is to contact the linking site owners and ask them to update the URL to https://dandylyons.net/notes/....
• Sitemaps: Your Hugo site generates a sitemap (sitemap.xml) for its content. Obsidian Publish generates a sitemap for the notes content. Submit both sitemaps to Google Search Console under your dandylyons.net property. This ensures search engines are aware of all content under your consolidated domain.
• Robots.txt: Your main Hugo site’s robots.txt file (usually in the static directory) governs crawling for the entire dandylyons.net domain.

By diligently addressing these SEO points, you can ensure a smoother transition in search engine visibility and maintain the discoverability of your notes content.

Conclusion

By migrating my notes from Obsidian Quartz to Obsidian Publish I’ve made it much easier to manage and publish my notes. And now with Netlify redirecting requests, I can keep the notes under my main domain (dandylyons.net/notes/), providing a seamless experience for users.