Introducing Lavadocs: public docs from your Obsidian notes

Lavadocs bridges the gap between the structured beauty of Markdown and the shareable convenience of online documents. Lavadocs extends an invitation to Obsidian users seeking a simple, shareable, and privacy-respecting way to publish their work.

What is Lavadocs?

Lavadocs stands as a view-only counterpart to Google Docs. It allows you to push documents from your Obsidian vault into a hosted webpage with a shareable link.

This little demo speaks a thousand words:

Diving into Lavadocs is a breeze. Start with signing up for a free account, install the Obsidian plugin, and use the Lava key from your account to integrate. With just a click, your documents will be ready for the world to see.

Why it exists

When I wanted to share my one off notes or in-progress writing, I had to make the annoying jump between Obsidian and Google Docs. It was particularly annoying when sharing essay drafts and docs with project collaborators.

Every time I shared the contents of an Obsidian note, I had to:

  • Create a new Google Doc
  • Copy my Obsidian markdown
  • Convert it to a format that Google Docs would behave with (I built a web tool to convert md for this)
  • Share the Google Doc
  • Manage two sources of truth

Building Lavadocs

There are two main components to Lavadocs: the web application and the Obsidian plugin.

The main application is powered by Ruby on Rails, SQLite, and TailwindCSS. The Obsidian plugin is written in TypeScript. Yep, it's SQLite in production, and it's awesome. I've got the application backed up with Litesteam.

The self-hosted edition is a forked version of the main application, but without some of the overhead around user management and billing.

Pricing and Hosting Options

I hemmed and hawed over this model for a bit, but wanted to make it as generous as possible, while still testing to see if this experiment was valuable enough for others to pay.

  • Hosted on Lavadocs.com: Users start with 50 docs for free, then $4.99 for every 100 documents.

After I initially launched the project, folks on Twitter were asking for a self-hosted version, so I spun one up.

  • Self-Hosted: It's a free (gift pricing) self-hosted option. Developers can take full control of their data and customize Lavadocs to their liking.

Lavadocs can grow in lots of ways! I'm excited to see how people use it. If you've got any feedback for me, I'm all ears.