+1 for portable, for the same reason (locked up devices)
This is strange.
After working at first (but maybe I did something else, really) the launcher.bat ends with “can’t find Obsidian.exe”
At first I thought I set the shortcut wrong, but it does the same when starting it directly on the drive.
Win10, no admin rights.
After I ran the launcher.bat, it stopped working for me, as well.
At that point, I dug into the Obsidian folders on the USB drive to find Obsidian.exe. Then I created a shortcut, which I copied to the main directory on the drive. It runs like a top for me now…no need to run the launcher.bat every time. (It appears that the requisite folders are all created in that first instance of running it.)
+1 on this if a web version included in sync is not implemented. An official portable install seems like a less labour intensive thing to allow for similar use cases as described by several users in this thread.
+1
I need a portable version on my device
+1 for this.
I was able to install obsidian on a work computer in the past when I had admin permissions, but I no longer have them. I’m concerned I’ll lose access if my installer can no longer update the app, the computer has an issue requiring a rebuild, or I get a new machine. I really love what I’ve set up with obsidian, but this limitation makes me question if I should continue investing time into it.
I do hope a portable install will be available soon. It just makes sense.
I’m adding my support for a portable version. Hopefully the devs will consider it at some point!
+1(000) to this, please implement this.
The existing solutions above are not really passable. The main point of a portable app is not just that it doesn’t need an install - an installed Obsidian program folder can already be just copied and it would work - but that everything the app needs, all the stored user data (/AppData/Roaming/) can reside in the same folder (or even better, at a path of the user choosing).
This wouldn’t require much effort. Most popular community Electron apps offer portable versions.
Links to third party redistributions/packages of Obsidian have been removed from forum because we do not endorse them.
Two methods to create portable versions have been spun off in separate threads:
An official release of a Portable distribution would be amazing. Even better if it is integrated within PortableApps
I would like that
I need it also !
+1, installing without admin would be just great!!
You can, you simply treat the installer like any other archive format (zip, 7z, etc). You can use a library like 7zip to unpack the installer, then unpack the $PLUGINSDIR\app-64.7z
resource. That gives you the stock obsidian install that’s usually located at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Obsidian
, just without the registry changes that the installer normally does.
+1, why is this not a thing yet
We need a portable version of Obsidian to be used at the office. Current installation requires admin right which is an IT request nightmare.