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.
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.
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.
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.