LK Technotes

Build a Digital Garden Blog with Quartz (and Obsidian)

2 min read

A Digital Garden is different from a classic blog: instead of only chronological posts, you build a connected knowledge base over time.
Quartz is a great fit for this because it natively supports wiki-style links, tags, backlinks, and folder navigation.

Why Quartz for a Garden?

  • Markdown-first content (no database)
  • Strong internal linking model
  • Great note navigation (Explorer + tags + backlinks)
  • Easy static deploy to almost any host

If you already write notes, Quartz lets you publish them with minimal friction.

Minimal Setup

# from your Quartz project
npm ci
npm run build
npm run dev

Your content lives under content/.
A practical structure for a mixed tech site is:

content/
  SAP/
    maintain-tax-code-when-sap-system-is-closed.md
  Tech/
    build-a-digital-garden-with-quartz.md
  index.md

Useful Quartz Config

Keep navigation focused and readable. A common Garden layout is Explorer on the left and TOC/Backlinks on the right:

// quartz.layout.ts (excerpt)
left: [Component.PageTitle(), Component.Search(), Component.Explorer()],
right: [Component.DesktopOnly(Component.TableOfContents()), Component.Backlinks()],

For Markdown behavior, Quartz already supports GFM-style parsing:

// quartz.config.ts (excerpt)
plugins: {
  transformers: [
    Plugin.GitHubFlavoredMarkdown(),
    Plugin.TableOfContents(),
    Plugin.CrawlLinks({ markdownLinkResolution: "shortest" }),
  ],
}

Obsidian Workflow (Low Friction)

Obsidian works very well as your authoring UI:

  1. Open your Quartz repo folder as an Obsidian vault.
  2. Write notes directly in content/Tech or content/SAP.
  3. Use internal links and tags while writing.
  4. Commit and push; CI builds and deploys.

This gives you a local-first writing experience with full Git history and no CMS lock-in.

Deployment Pattern

A lightweight pipeline is enough:

  1. Checkout repository
  2. Install dependencies (npm ci)
  3. Build (npm run build)
  4. Upload public/ to your host

That keeps infra simple while still giving reliable, versioned releases.

References