My convoluted and homegrown blogging setup

Published: 2025-12-17T00:00:00.000Z

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Goal:

• Write blog posts in obsidian, which I use for personal journaling
• Marking a blog post as “live” in the front matter publishes it to this website. Unpublish supported as well

Constraints:

• I only get 500 builds on my cloudflare worker per month, so I don’t want every change to trigger a new push

Tools / Architecture

• Obsidian is synced across all of my devices via a combination of iCloud and a syncthing instance that runs on my homelab
• Website is built by a Cloudflare worker that tracks a GitHub repo, pushing to the repository updates the website
• Use inotifywait on the homelab to monitor changes to my Obsidian vault’s blog directory
• When a change is observed, emit a signal to start a script that checks if a blog post’s status or content has changed
• If a change is detected, translate the Obsidian markdown file into a website-ready. Git add, commit, push
• Voila, we have it?

Things I need to make work

• inotifywait listens to correct directory, sends event to correct location, runs as a systemd service
• Comparison script correctly sees publish events, translator script converts from Obsidian to Astro markdown
• Git commands can be triggered from same script. Probably with a delay?

If you’re reading this, it worked :)

Implementation notes

• inotifywatch triggered a trivial echo in response to obsidian updates while inotifywait -r ~/syncthing/obsidian/blog -e modify; do { echo "test"; }; done
• put this as a script into a systemd

[Unit]
Description=blog inotifywatch service
After=network_online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=~/projects/website-v2/watch_for_updates.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=mutil-user.target

• inspect using journalctl -f -u blog_inotifywatch.service, remember to put the #!/bin/bash at the start of your script
• test with an update, at 1:20am, and another update, and another update,another update bb, another, another, another, another, another, update, another, update, update, another woohoo!another update hmm lets see, another woohoo, another update
• trying to get the name of the file that was modified so we don’t have to crawl everything. I guess this could also be a cron job :)
• filename has line breaks, otherwise the current bash script seems to be working. Found that we can update the --format flag to handle this better, and use IFS= with " when referencing to the variable to handle the entire file path update
• copy the obsidian file into the website’s directory, now let’s git add it and check the diff
• checking the git diff, timing will be a little interesting, we don’t want to send multiple events, but maybe syncthing will handle that cleanly. Can also put a sleep call in there. Now it’s onto debugging. Continuing debugging
• …lots of debugging later

The Final(?) test

• dry runs went well, going to turn on the systemd watcher, edit the next line, and watch this file 1) be added to a git commit and then 2) get pushed when live is clicked
• this line should commit, nope, fatal: detected dubious ownership
• fix the above, cross fingers, more git issues, fix them, it’s taking awhile, maybe it didn’t pick up these changes
• needed to add a HOME to the systemd .service file
• ssh-keyscan wasn’t started :), number of things that could be going wrong is slowly but surely decreasing to 0
• having lots of trouble getting the service to use my correct git username, permissions and linux will be good to get more familiar with as I do more projects on the homelab