Obsidian, the powerful hypertext platform is using markdown files but it’s single-user and doesn’t support collaboration.
Would it be possible to link my Obsidian-based, personal digital garden with Discourse (thus creating collaboration opportunities around it), via the Discourse API?
Hello @technoshaman 
! I’m a fellow Obsidian user as well.
Anything is technically possible with the Discourse API. If it can be done in the UI, it’s possible to get it done in the API.
As far as interacting with Obsidian, are you talking about the Publish feature, or the set of files in your vault? You might be able to wire up some API calls using the new plugin API.
Here are some resources that might help.
And for some API examples:
Using the Discourse API Ruby Gem
How to make requests to the Discourse API with Zapier
Thank you so much, Justin! Your answer was very helpful.
Now, I just need to work out the requirements specification for the tech platform of my “linking knowledge ecosystems” research. Namely, whether i should integrate Obisidan Publish with Discourse or CodiMD?
When I will have more clarity about that, may I come back to you for advice?
I can’t say that I’m aware of CodiMD. Feel free to ask questions here – myself or others in the community will be able to help on Discourse-related questions.
Thanks, Justin. Here’s a totally newbie question. If someone could find out how to link an Obisidan vault with a Discourse forum, would the new thing show up in Obsidian or Discourse?
Btw, I watched a number of your vids on YouTube, which helped me to choose Obs for my digital garden. I didn’t know that you’re on Discourse, too.
One more question. Assuming that someday, we’ll have a Minimum Viable Prototype linking a (community) knowledge garden created as a Published Obs vault with a Discourse forum, then what would be the simplest way to integrate new contributions to the knowledge garden?
Would peops have to enter them in the forum and then I would have to manually integrate them in the vault? Can you imagine any better way?
This really depends on technical implementation. I’m really not quite sure.
There are webhooks in Discourse for new posts/topics. If you had some kind of middleware server that could function between the two and receive the Discourse webhooks, you could get it done somehow, but that’s dependent upon being able to create and automatically publish to Obsidian Publish. That’s not yet possible I don’t believe. Some of this might be a great question for the Obsidian forums at https://forum.obsidian.md.
hi Justin,
As a baby step towards creating a proof-of-concept for Obs-Discourse interoperability via API calls, I wanna install Discourse on Digital Ocean. The Discourse FAQ says, “the community can install Discourse in the cloud for you for a flat one-time fee.” Do you know whom should I ask?
Hey George. Please see Discourse Installation Packages — Literate Computing, LLC. I’ll be happy to help. If you use Digital Ocean and Mailgun the installation is completely automated. If you make the DNS changes quickly, the whole process is under 30 minutes.
Thanks!
Thank you, Jay. I’m weighing my choices and will get back to you if that’s the path that I want to take.