Does anyone manage settings of multiple Vaults using a git repo?

Knowledge management
1

Ok, there was a number of topics about sharing of settings between vaults. It has not been implemented yet.

How do you cope with that? If you have just two vaults, you can just copy all settings, and change the theme, but it quickly gets out of hand if you have more than two vaults, or some small differences that you one to keep (e.g. some folder names are different).

I have an idea to use git repository for settings, and I was wondering if somebody already tried it. Was it successful? What advice can you give? What files did you exclude from the repo?

Cheers

2

I do, and Iā€™m pretty happy about mine :slight_smile: Iā€™ll try to describe as best I can, but feel free to ask questions or for examples.

I use two vaults for work and for home. I use Github to manage myā€¦

  • Directory structure (I put a dummy file called ā€˜.includedirā€™ in each directory so that Git registers it).
  • Common templates
  • Plug-ins
  • Obsidian settings
  • Saved workspaces and ā€œdashboardsā€ (dashboards being notes with a bunch of dataviews/Tasks queries that are universally helpful).

I pretty much ignore all .md files (except Template files) and the workspace file. Sometimes I need to change what gets ignored for community plugins like obsidian-project (.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-projects/data.json). I also have a specific folder for my context-specific templates (Templater/templates/exclude/**). My daily note template indirectly inserts a template from that folder so that I can have different daily notes in each vault.

_Inbox/**/*.md
Notes/**/*.md
PARA/**/*.md
Kanban/*.md
Attachments/**
.obsidian/workspace
.obsidian/graph.json
.obsidian/workspace.json
.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-projects/data.json

# Common variated files
Templater/templates/exclude/**

When it comes to managing it, itā€™s enough to just use Github Desktop. Occasionally I run into problems, but I think most problems with this set-up are easily figured out with Google or just modifying the files however Git asks you to.

For the most part, I use both my vaults in exactly the same way. As noted above, really itā€™s only my daily note templates that differ (and my preview/review templates, I guess).

I donā€™t bother with having a different theme for work and home. Iā€™d like to at some point, but havenā€™t gotten around to figuring out what I would need to do for that to fit in this scheme. Iā€™m also afraid of ignoring some files then making a change that I would prefer propagate from one vault to the other.

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3

Hey, thank you for your answer. Thatā€™s extremely helpful!

I think ignoring appearence.json would do the trick?

Iā€™m afraid I did not get this part.

4

Your suggestion and confusion are probably due to me not understanding how themes work.

I updated my theme and looked at the updates to my tracked files in Git. I see that the only modified files of concern are appearance.json. So, I think your suggestion is spot on!

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