When binary releases are unavailable for your platform, or you do not trust the pre-built binaries, then *obsidian-export* can be compiled from source with relatively little effort.
> It is expected that you successfully configured the PATH variable correctly while installing the Rust toolchain, as described under *"Configuring the PATH environment variable"* on <https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install>.
As a text interface, this must be run from a terminal or Windows PowerShell.
It is assumed that you have basic familiarity with command-line interfaces and that you set up your `PATH` correctly if you installed with `cargo`.
Running `obsidian-export --version` should print a version number rather than giving some kind of error.
>
> If you downloaded a pre-built binary and didn't put it a location referenced by `PATH` (for example, you put it in `Downloads`), you will need to provide the full path to the binary instead.
>
> For example `~/Downloads/obsidian-export --version` on Mac/Linux or `~\Downloads\obsidian-export --version` on Windows (PowerShell).
Note that in this mode, obsidian-export sees `some-note.md` as being the only file that exists in your vault so references to other notes won't be resolved.
This is by design.
If you'd like to export a single note while resolving links or embeds to other areas in your vault then you should instead specify the root of your vault as the source, passing the file you'd like to export with `--start-at`, as described in the next section.
### Exporting a partial vault
Using the `--start-at` argument, you can export just a subset of your vault.
Given the following vault structure:
````
my-obsidian-vault
├── Notes/
├── Books/
└── People/
````
This will export only the notes in the `Books` directory to `exported-notes`:
In this mode, all notes under the source (the first argument) are considered part of the vault so any references to these files will remain intact, even if they're not part of the exported notes.
At present, UTF-8 character encoding is assumed for all note text as well as filenames.
All text and file handling performs [lossy conversion to Unicode strings](https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/string/struct.String.html#method.from_utf8_lossy).
Use of non-UTF8 encodings may lead to issues like incorrect text replacement and failure to find linked notes.
While this may change in the future, there are no plans to change this behavior in the short term.
By default, hidden files, patterns listed in `.export-ignore` as well as any files ignored by git (if your vault is part of a git repository) will be excluded from exports.
It's possible to end up with "recursive embeds" when two notes embed each other.
This happens for example when a `Note A.md` contains `![[Note B]]` but `Note B.md` also contains `![[Note A]]`.
By default, this will trigger an error and display the chain of notes which caused the recursion.
This behavior may be changed by specifying `--no-recursive-embeds`.
Using this mode, if a note is encountered for a second time while processing the original note, instead of embedding it again a link to the note is inserted instead to break the cycle.
As a result of this, notes that have been exported from Obsidian using obsidian-export do not work out of the box because Hugo doesn't resolve these links correctly.
[Markdown Render Hooks] (only supported using the default `goldmark` renderer) allow you to work around this issue however, making exported notes work with Hugo after a bit of one-time setup work.
{{- with .Title }} title="{{ . | safeHTML }}"{{- end -}}
{{- with .Text }} alt="{{ . | safeHTML }}"
{{- end -}}
/>
{{- /* whitespace stripped here to avoid trailing newline in rendered result caused by file EOL */ -}}
````
With these hooks in place, links to both notes as well as file attachments should now work correctly.
>
> Note: If you're using a theme which comes with it's own render hooks, you might need to do a little extra work, or customize the snippets above, to avoid conflicts with the hooks from your theme.
All of the functionality exposed by the `obsidian-export` CLI command is also accessible as a Rust library, exposed through the [`obsidian_export` crate](https://crates.io/crates/obsidian-export).
To get started, visit the library documentation on [obsidian_export](https://docs.rs/obsidian-export/latest/obsidian_export/) and [obsidian_export::Exporter](https://docs.rs/obsidian-export/latest/obsidian_export/struct.Exporter.html).
Thank you so much for wanting to contribute to this project.
I greatly appreciate any efforts people like you put into making obsidian-export better!
Managing an open-source project can take a lot of time and effort however.
As this is a passion project which I maintain alongside my regular daytime job, I need to take some measures to safeguard my mental health and the enjoyment of this project.
This document aims to provide guidance which makes contributions easier by:
1. Defining the expectations I have of submissions to the codebase and the pull request process.
1. Helping you get set up for development on the code.
1. Providing pointers to some areas of the codebase, as well as some design considerations to take into account when making changes.
## Working with Rust
Obsidian-export is written in [Rust](https://www.rust-lang.org/), which is not the easiest of languages to master.
If you'd like to contribute but you don't know Rust, check out [Learn Rust](https://www.rust-lang.org/learn) for some suggestions of how to get started with the language.
In general, I will do my best to support you and help you out, but understand my time for mentoring is highly limited.
To work on the codebase, you'll also need the Rust toolchain, including cargo, rustfmt and clippy.
The easiest way is to [install Rust using rustup](https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install), which lets you install rustfmt and clippy using `rustup component add rustfmt` and `rustup component add clippy` respectively.
## Design principles
My intention is to keep the core of `obsidian-export` as limited and small as possible, avoiding changes to the core [`Exporter`](https://docs.rs/obsidian-export/latest/obsidian_export/struct.Exporter.html) struct or any of its methods whenever possible.
This improves long-term maintainability and makes investigation of bugs simpler.
To keep the core of obsidian-export small while still supporting a wide range of use-cases, additional functionality should be pushed down into [postprocessors](https://docs.rs/obsidian-export/latest/obsidian_export/type.Postprocessor.html) as much as possible.
You can see some examples of this in:
* [Support Obsidian's "Strict line breaks" setting (#57)](https://github.com/zoni/obsidian-export/pull/57)
* [Frontmatter based filtering (#67)](https://github.com/zoni/obsidian-export/pull/67)
## Conventions
Code is formatted with [rustfmt](https://github.com/rust-lang/rustfmt) using the default options.
In addition, all default [clippy](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-clippy) checks on the latest stable Rust compiler must also pass.
Both of these are enforced through CI using GitHub actions.
>
> **💡 Tip: install pre-commit hooks**
>
> This codebase is set up with the [pre-commit framework](https://pre-commit.com/) to automatically run the appropriate checks locally whenever you commit.
> Assuming you [have pre-commit installed](https://pre-commit.com/#install), all you need to do is run `pre-commit install` once to get this set up.
Following my advice on [creating high-quality commits](https://nick.groenen.me/notes/high-quality-commits/) will make it easier for me to review changes.
I don't insist on this, but pull requests which fail to adhere to these conventions are at risk of being squashed and having their commit messages rewritten when they are accepted.
## Tests
In order to have confidence that your changes work as intended, as well as to avoid regressions when making changes in the future, I would like to see code accompanied by test cases.
At the moment, the test framework primary relies on high-level integration tests, all of which are defined in the [tests](tests/) directory.
These rely on comparing Markdown notes [before](tests/testdata/input) and [after](tests/testdata/expected) running an export.
By studying some of the existing tests, you should be able to copy and adapt these for your own changes.
For an example of doing low-level unit tests, you can look at the end of [frontmatter.rs](src/frontmatter.rs).
## Documentation
I place a lot of value on good documentation and would encourage you to include updates to the docs with your changes.
Changes or additions to public methods and attributes **must** come with proper documentation for a PR to be accepted.
Advice on writing Rust documentation can be found in:
* [The rustdoc book: How to write documentation](https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustdoc/how-to-write-documentation.html)
* [Rust by example: Documentation](https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/meta/doc.html)
Updates to the user guide/README instructions are also preferred, but optional.
If you don't feel comfortable writing user documentation, I will be happy to guide you or do it for you.
>
> **⚠ Warning**
>
> If you update the README file, take note that you must edit the fragments in the [docs](docs/) directory as opposed to the README in the root of the repository, which is auto-generated.
Obsidian-export is open-source software released under the [BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent License].
This license is designed to provide: a) a simple permissive license; b) that is compatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2; and c) which also has an express patent grant included.
