Self-Hosted Note Share

Share a single Obsidian note as a public link. The note opens in any browser — formatting, tables, callouts, code highlighting and its images intact — and the person reading it needs no account, no app and no Obsidian.

https://notes.example.com/V1StGXR8_Z5jdHi6B-myT

The link points at a server you run. Nothing is sent anywhere else, there is no telemetry, and unsharing deletes the note from the server for good.

What it does

• Share the note you are in with one command, and get the link on your clipboard.
• Keep the link stable. Edit the note, run Update shared note, and the same URL serves the new version. Anyone you already sent it to keeps working.
• Bring the images along. Embedded attachments upload with the note and are served from your server, not hotlinked from anywhere.
• Take it down. Unshare note deletes the note and its images. The link stops working immediately.
• Works on mobile as well as desktop.

Install

From Obsidian — Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search for Self-Hosted Note Share → Install, then Enable.

By hand — download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release and drop them in <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/self-hosted-note-share/.

Obsidian 1.5.0 or newer.

Setup

Open Settings → Self-Hosted Note Share and put in your server's address. That is the only thing to configure — there is no account and no key. Press Test connection to check the address answers.

Don't have a server yet? Setting one up is a single Docker Compose file on any VPS.

There is one option: Copy link after sharing, on by default, which puts the URL on your clipboard the moment a note goes up.

Commands

Run these from the command palette, or bind them to hotkeys.

Command	What it does
Share note	Publishes the current note and copies its link.
Update shared note	Pushes your edits to the link you already shared.
Copy share link	Puts the note's existing link back on the clipboard.
Unshare note	Deletes the note from the server. Asks first.

Once a note is shared, the plugin records share_id, share_url and share_token in its frontmatter, so the note itself remembers where it lives and holds the one credential that can change it. None of that frontmatter is ever published.

Good to know

• Your frontmatter is never published. Tags, dates and anything else you keep up there stay in the vault. Only the body of the note is uploaded.
• Only the images you embed are shown. An image pasted in as an external URL renders as its alt text — the viewer will not fetch anything from another site on your reader's behalf.
• Links to other notes ([[Wikilinks]]) render as their name. Sharing a note shares that note, not everything it points at.
• Unsharing is permanent. There is no trash to restore from.
• The note is what can edit the share. Delete the note, or strip its frontmatter, and the published page stays up with no way to change or remove it from Obsidian — the server keeps only a digest of the token and cannot hand it back. Whoever runs the server can mint a new one.
• A link is unguessable, not secret. Each one carries 126 bits of entropy, so nobody will stumble onto it — but anyone you give it to can pass it on.

Your server

The plugin is one half of the project. The other half is the server it publishes to: an API and a viewer you run yourself, on your own domain, with your own storage.

• Setting up a server — Docker Compose, TLS, backups
• Architecture and threat model
• API reference
• Roadmap and known limitations

Found a security problem? Please report it privately rather than opening an issue.

Licence

MIT.