Simple second brain and digital garden.
Hosting a public digital garden isn’t easy. There are an overwhelming number of tutorials, resources, and guides for tools like +
Simple second brain and +digital garden +.
Hosting a public digital garden isn’t easy. There are an overwhelming number of tutorials, resources, and guides for tools like Notion , Roam , and Obsidian -, yet none of them have super easy to use free tools to publish that garden to the world.
I’ve personally found that
“He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.” — Richard Hamming
The goal of Quartz is to make hosting your own public digital garden free and simple.
The entire Quartz documentation is fully hosted using Quartz! You can navigate it using the interactive Graph view below.
If you’d prefer more traditional navigation, you can also find all relevant pages through the main directory.
👉 -Directory
I’ve personally found that
“He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.” — Richard Hamming
I was really inspired by +Bianca +and +Joel +’s digital gardens and wanted to try making my own.
The goal of Quartz is to make hosting your own public digital garden free and simple. You don’t even need your own website. Quartz does all of that for you and gives your own little corner of the internet.
The entire Quartz documentation is fully hosted using Quartz! To get started, let’s visit the main directory.
👉 +Directory
Welcome to Quartz! Whether you’re setting up a website and project for the first time or a seasoned digital gardener, I hope that you’ll find something useful about this project.
Let’s get to business and get you started!
Want to see what Quartz can do? Here are some cool community gardens :)
If you want to see your own on here, submit a Pull Request adding yourself to this file -!
Quartz is designed to be extremely configurable. You can find the bulk of the configuration scattered throughout the repository depending on how in-depth you’d like to get.
The majority of configuration can be be found under data/config.yaml. An annotated example configuration is shown below.
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Want to go even more in-depth? You can add custom CSS styling and change existing colours through editing assets/custom.scss. If you’d like to target specific parts of the site, you can add ids and classes to the HTML partials in /layouts/partials.
Partials are what dictate what actually gets rendered to the page. Want to change how pages are styled and structured? You can edit the appropriate layout in /layouts.
For example, the structure of the home page can be edited through /layouts/index.html. To customize the footer, you can edit /layouts/partials/footer.html
More info about partials on Hugo’s website.
Still having problems? Checkout our FAQ and Troubleshooting guide -.
Quartz runs on top of +
Quartz runs on top of Hugo so all notes are written in Markdown -.
All content in your garden can found in the /content folder. To make edits, you can open any of the files and make changes directly and save it. You can organize content into any folder you’d like.
To edit the main home page, open /content/_index.md.
To create a link, just create a normal link using Markdown pointing to the document in question. Please note that all links should be relative to the root /content path.
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This step is purely optional and mostly for those who want to see the published version of their digital garden locally before opening it up to the internet. For those who like to live life more on the edge, viewing the garden through Obsidian gets you pretty close to the real thing.
hugo-obsidianThis step will generate the list of backlinks for Hugo to parse. Ensure you have +Go +(>= 1.16) installed.
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Afterwards, start the Hugo server as shown above and your local backlinks and interactive graph should be populated!
Hugo is the static site generator that powers Quartz. If you’d like to preview your site locally, install Hugo .
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hugo-obsidianThis step is doubly optional and only applies to those who want to see their Interactive Graph and backlinks locally while previewing changes on the site.
Ensure you have Go (>= 1.16) installed.
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Afterwards, start the Hugo server as shown above and your local backlinks and interactive graph should be populated!
Now that you know the basics of managing your digital garden using Quartz, you can publish it to the internet!
🌍 +
Now that you know the basics of managing your digital garden using Quartz, you can publish it to the internet!
Having problems? Checkout our FAQ and Troubleshooting guide -.
Quartz is designed to be effortless to deploy. If you forked and cloned Quartz directly from the repository, everything should already be good to go! You can head to <YOUR-GITHUB-USERNAME.github.io/quartz to see it live.
By default, Github Actions will run on forks of repos. You should not need to do any more config to see it up to date.
Have a fancy custom domain or want to subdomain your Quartz? That’s easy too.
Change baseURL in /config.toml.
-Reference.
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This step is only applicable if you are using a custom domain! If you are using <YOUR-USERNAME>.github.io, you can skip this step.
For this last bit to take effect, you also need to create a CNAME record with the DNS provider you register your domain with (i.e. NameCheap, Google Domains).
GitHub has some documentation on this , but the tldr; is to
Go to your forked repository (github.com/<YOUR-GITHUB-USERNAME>/quartz) settings page and go to the Pages tab. Under “Custom domain”, type your custom domain, then click Save.
Go to your DNS Provider and create a CNAME record that points from your domain to <YOUR-GITHUB-USERNAME.github.io. (yes, with the trailing period).
Example Configuration for Quartz
Wait 30 minutes to an hour for the network changes to kick in.
Done!
Now that your Quartz is live, let’s figure out how to make Quartz really yours!
Having problems? Checkout our FAQ and Troubleshooting guide -.
Obsidian is the preferred way to use Quartz. You can either create a new Obsidian Vault or link one that your already have.
If you don’t have an existing Vault,
download Obsidian
and create a new Vault in the /content folder that you created and cloned during the
setup
-.
The easiest way to use an existing Vault is to copy all of our files (directory and hierarchies intact) into the /content folder.
Great, now that you have your Obsidian linked to your Quartz, let’s fix some settings so that they play well.
Under Options > Files and Links, set the New link format to always be Absolute Path in Vault and disabled WikiLinks so Obsidian generates regular Markdown links.
Obsidian Settings
Inserting front matter everytime you want to create a new Note gets really annoying really quickly. Luckily, Obsidian supports templates which makes inserting new content really easily.
If you decide to overwrite the /content folder completely, don’t remove the /content/templates folder!
Head over to Options > Core Plugins and enable the Templates plugin. Then go to Options > Hotkeys and set a hotkey for ‘Insert Template’. That way, when you create a new note, you can just press the hotkey for a new template and be ready to go!
Setting up Quartz requires a basic understanding of git. If you are unfamiliar,
this resource
is a great place to start!
A fork is a copy of a repository. Forking a repository allows you to freely experiment with changes without affecting the original project.
Navigate to the GitHub repository for the Quartz project:
📁 @@ -11,5 +11,5 @@ is a great place to start!
A fork i
Great! Now you have everything you need to start editing and growing your digital garden. If you’re ready to start writing content already, check out the recommended flow for editing notes in Quartz.
Having problems? Checkout our FAQ and Troubleshooting guide -.
You probably forgot to include front matter in your Markdown files. You can either setup +
No! Setting up Quartz means you set up a site too :)
Enable GitHub Actions
Enable GitHub Pagescommand not found: hugo-obsidianMake sure you set your GOPATH correctly! This will allow your terminal to correctly recognize hugo-obsidian as an executable.
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You probably forgot to include front matter in your Markdown files. You can either setup Obsidian to do this for you or you need to manually define it. More details in the ‘how to edit’ guide @@ -12,6 +24,8 @@ again. Make sure you wait 30 min to 1 hour for changes to take effect.
Example image (source is in content/notes/images/example.png)
By default, the linkIndex.yaml (which Quartz needs to generate the Interactive Graph and Backlinks) are not regenerated locally. To set that up, see the guide on
-local editing
Not out of the box. You could probably make it work by editing /layouts/_default/single.html but that’s not what Quartz is designed to work with. 99% of things you are trying to do with those frameworks you can accomplish perfectly fine using just vanilla HTML/CSS/JS.
Quartz isn’t perfect! If you’re still having troubles, file an issue in the GitHub repo with as much information as you can reasonably provide.