| created | modified |
|---|---|
2024-12-11 23:08:06 UTC |
2024-12-12 11:45:42 UTC |
When I woke up this morning, I almost immediately started thinking about my .gitignore for Obsidian and decided to fix it.
Due to the fact that Obsidian stores a lot of configuration information in the .obsidian/ folder -- such as hotkeys and plugins -- it seems like the best choice is to include everything in that folder by default (with a few specific exclusions) rather than excluding everything and trying to keep track of what should be specifically included.
As I discovered with custom hotkeys, the latter approach is likely to lead to configuration changes being lost over time. The former approach -- while somewhat risky if sensitive data within plugins were accidentally leaked through a public repository -- seems, overall, to be the far "safer" option.
Christopher Patton provides a detailed explanation of various .gitignore options in the following pull request:
Note that Obsidian stores the list of community plugins currently installed for the vault in the .obsidian/community-plugins.json file. However, it currently does not automatically install those plugins as necessary when opening the vault.
To understand the issues with this, consider the following scenario:
- I am working in a new environment (e.g. a freshly built Linux VM) and consequently want to clone the [[Ideaverse]] vault from GitHub (so I can view or add some notes without switching back to my Windows desktop).
- I run
git clone https://github.com/jeremy-jameson/Ideaverse.git, - I install Obsidian on the Linux VM.
- I open the vault in the folder cloned from GitHub.
While the community-plugins.json file specifies the plugins previously installed on my Windows desktop, Obsidian ignores the fact that they are missing on the Linux VM. As a result, my notes do not render as expected (for example, due to the Dataview plugin not being installed).
It would be ideal if Obsidian prompted to install any missing plugins specified in community-plugins.json, but since it currently does not, I am changing .gitignore to include the entire contents of the .obsidian/plugins folder.