stocad - Digital Garden

digital-gardening

3 min read

Setting up a quartz obsidian digital garden

Working from the getting started instructions, this site will be publicly hosted on github. Different from the instructions, I would like to host this site on AWS Amplify hosting which I will document below.

The basic idea here is to host public only content in the digital gardening. 12 Content will be evergreen, I like the idea of keeping a password protected garden compiled out of a private vault/repo as a way to separate out the personal, directly connected to me content from more evergreen public content. I don’t aspire to turn this content into a book or a monetary.

This raises the question of content rights. For the moment, I am adding the CC BY-NC-SA3 license to the footer. I think this best captures the intent of what I’m doing.

I’m tempted to launch into a ramble about no-motes, no-kings, but I’ll plant those as greenhouse for another time.

Alright, lets get this up on the internet before I get lost down any other rabbit trails.

  1. Create a new Amplify application.
  2. Select the Github repository with my initial commit
  3. Give the app a name
  4. Frontend build command: npx quartz build
  5. Build output directory: public
  6. Click through to Save and Deploy

At this point Amplify failed to deploy with the error:

Amplify engine Not compatible with your version of node/npm: @jackyzha0/quartz@4.5.0
...
npm ERR! notsup Required: {"npm":">=9.3.1","node":">=20"}

Reading around online this can be resolved by using nvm to set the node version during pre-build.

So… In the AWS Amplify console, under the application I:

  • Went to Hosting > Build settings
  • Changed preBuild to the following:
	...
		 preBuild:
			commands:
                - 'nvm install 20'
                - 'nvm use 20'
                - 'npm ci --cache .npm --prefer-offline'
    ...

This deploys. Great! Now I have an arbitrary Amplify url and I need to map garde.stocad.com to this build process.

Back in the AWS Amplify App console, under Hosting > Custom domain.

  1. Select the domain name to connect
    1. This tries to use Route 53, but I’m using cloudflare, so I need to copy the DNS info across to cloudflare for this to work
  2. Once added, under Actions > View DNS Records
  3. Open Cloudflare and copy both the verify and subdomain records across to Cloudflare (or wherever you manage DNS)
  4. And, after a minute of waiting and an odd resolution error message, there it is!

Local development is made easy by running npx quartz build --serve, which I am now using to iterate locally before publishing.

Footnotes

  1. https://obsidian.rocks/creating-a-digital-garden-in-obsidian/ ↩

  2. https://jzhao.xyz/posts/networked-thought#what-is-digital-gardening ↩

  3. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ ↩

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