What is Obsidian Digital Garden?

Obsidian Digital Garden is a free and open source publishing tool for Obsidian that lets you publish your notes directly from Obsidian to the internet. It is aimed at people who keep notes in Obsidian and want a public, browsable version of them without leaving the app or migrating content to a separate CMS. You can run it as a full digital garden or as a simple note sharing solution, and features can be enabled or disabled on a per-note basis.

What it does

The plugin turns selected Obsidian notes into a website. Instead of exporting files and uploading them manually, you publish from inside Obsidian, and the plugin handles the transformation of your notes into web pages.

Two common ways people use it:

• Full digital garden — a growing, interconnected set of public notes with links between them, meant to be explored rather than read linearly.
• Simple note sharing — publish only a handful of notes you want to send to someone, keeping the rest private.

Because features are configurable per note, you do not have to make an all-or-nothing decision about your vault. A note can be published or kept private individually.

Key characteristics

The "highly configurable and hackable" description matters if you want to adjust how your garden looks or behaves rather than accept a fixed template. It also means setup can involve more decisions than a one-click service.

Hosting options

The plugin itself is the publishing tool; you still need somewhere for the site to live. The project points to two paths:

• Self-managed setup — use the plugin and configure hosting yourself. This is the free, open source route and gives you the most control.
• Forestry.md cloud service — a newly launched hosted option described as a one-click setup for hosting your digital garden "without any technical hassle." Choose this if you would rather not deal with the technical configuration.

The page does not state pricing for Forestry.md, so treat cost as something to confirm on that service directly rather than assuming it is free.

Seeing what others have built

The project site itself is powered by the Digital Garden plugin, so it doubles as a working example. For a broader, community-maintained list, the page points to the Obsidian Gallery maintained by GitHub user Jiri Sifalda, which tracks Digital Gardens created by the community. Featured sites listed include Edav Garden, ajy.co, Teresa Watts, That Other Dev, Hermitage, IceWind.Quest, Craft Engineer, DigiGarden, and notes.ole.dev.

Browsing a few of these is the fastest way to judge whether the output style matches what you want before committing to setup.

How to decide if it fits

Choose Obsidian Digital Garden if:

• Your notes already live in Obsidian and you want to publish without switching tools.
• You want per-note control over what becomes public.
• You are comfortable with a configurable, hackable tool — or willing to use the Forestry.md hosted option to skip the technical work.
• You want either a long-term digital garden or occasional note sharing from the same setup.

Look elsewhere if you need a fully managed, zero-configuration publishing platform with no hosting decisions, or if you do not use Obsidian as your note source.

Getting started

The project page links to Getting Started, Features, and Plugins sections, plus a Discord server for support. Start with Getting Started for the setup path, then check Features to see what can be toggled per note. If setup feels like more than you want to handle, evaluate the Forestry.md cloud service as the lower-effort alternative.