🪴 Dom's Digital Garden

A place for me to publish my learnings as I dive into topics and document my active projects.

Because I couldn't bring myself to pay 10 dollars a month for Obsidian Publish, I have decided to use a modified version of quartz based on Brandon Boswell's Tutorial which has allowed me to host my own digital garden using GitHub Pages.

I have a single Obsidian Vault with personal and public notes hosted on iCloud Drive (so I have access on my iPhone). I originally used separate scripts to export, review, and publish my notes. I'm now moving that workflow into my personal fork of Quartz Syncer so I can review the files and changes in Obsidian before explicitly publishing them. Private folders and excluded notes stay out of the export. The plugin is configured to send reviewed content to the content/ directory on the v5 branch, where GitHub Actions builds and deploys the site to GitHub Pages.

The site now runs on Quartz 5.0.0, with a notebook-style redesign to match dominicklee.net. The personal styles and components live in site/notebook/, separate from Quartz core to make future upgrades easier.

🔗 Dom's Digital Garden 🪴

Prerequisites

• Install Node Version Manager.
• Use the v5 branch. Quartz4 is the older site branch.
• Quartz 5 requires Node 22 or newer and npm 10.9.2 or newer. The commands below use the Node version pinned in .node-version, matching GitHub Actions.

How to develop locally

From the v5 checkout:

nvm install "$(cat .node-version)"
nvm use "$(cat .node-version)"
npm ci
npx quartz plugin install --from-config
npm run install-plugins
npm run site:preview -- --port 8080

Open localhost:8080. For a production build without the preview server, run npm run site:build. These site commands keep dates in the America/Los_Angeles time zone, both locally and in GitHub Actions.

If npm ci fails while compiling sharp and mentions libvips or node-gyp, your machine is probably picking up a global libvips install. In that case, rerun the install with:

SHARP_IGNORE_GLOBAL_LIBVIPS=1 npm ci

After editing the custom components or browser scripts, rebuild their local plugin packages with node site/notebook/build.mjs and restart the preview. See the notebook layer guide for checks and upgrade notes.

Share banner

The banner above also appears in link previews. Edit the portable SVG source, then run npm run site:social-image to regenerate the 1200 × 630 PNG. Commit both files; the README displays the same image at a compact 640px width.

Flower hunt

The Flower Hunt plugin adds a small scavenger hunt that reveals Open Personal Growth after collecting petals. Hidden paths and petal locations are configured in quartz.config.yaml. This hides ordinary discovery, not access to the publicly hosted files. The plugin and its editable SVG drawing code live in site/flower-hunt/, separate from Quartz core.

Publishing

Push site code changes to v5; GitHub Actions builds and deploys them. For notes, review and explicitly approve the changes in Quartz Syncer before publishing to v5 → content. Building locally does not publish anything, and a successful push still needs a successful Pages deployment before the live site updates.