Team Wiki With Obsidian
A couple other developers on my team at work and I were talking about potentially overhauling our developer wiki. The current one has gotten pretty out of date over time. It’s also a little cumbersome and nobody really enjoys using it.
If we did overhaul our wiki, the new system would need to be:
- easy to setup
- easy to maintain
- portable
After some time going over a couple options, I thought, “Could Obsidian work here?”. After giving it a try I think the answer is yes!
Obsidian is a markdown editor with a really rich plugin ecosystem. One of those plugins is a git sync plugin. You might see where this is going.
The solution I came up with was as simple as creating a new git repo, pointing Obsidian at it, and porting some of our existing wiki content to markdown. Organization is simple, just create directories and fill them with markdown files. Formatting is easy and clean. Linking between different pages and sections is easy. The git plugin seamlessly handles pulling and pushing new content.
The only caveat was remembering to add the .obsidian directory to the gitignore. Otherwise, each team member’s Obsidian settings would get synced.
Obsidian ended up fitting the goals perfectly.
- It’s very minimal and super easy to setup.
- There’s really no maintenance to speak of. Editing is encouraged because you’re already viewing the content in an editor.
- It couldn’t be more portable. Nobody is tied to Obsidian since the wiki is just a git repo of markdown files. Obsidian just makes viewing and editing easy.
I’ve already been using Obsidian for several months for my personal notes, but this experience made me appreciate how versatile of a tool it can be!