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Obsidian

Introduction

I already was a fan of Obsidian and I saw I could deploy it as a Docker container!
For me that sounded really exciting!
I also wanted a way to work from any device on some files in my Obsidian vault.
For the mentioned above you will setup something like Syncthing.
I will describe how to setup Syncthing in another article on the website.
Letś go and deploy Obsidian!

Deploying

Obsidian is being hosted in a Kasm workplace Docker container.
Kasm is an application which let's you run 1 or more application in a Docker container.
In this article I am going to deploy this Docker container in Portainer with Docker Compose.

  1. Navigate to your Portainer instance
  2. Select your environment and navigate to Stacks
  3. Click on Add stack
  4. Give the stack a name select the Web editor as build method
  5. Paste the Docker Compose configuration in the Web editor
    Obsidian Config
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    services:
  obsidian:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/obsidian:latest
    container_name: obsidian
    security_opt:
      - seccomp:unconfined #optional
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Europe/Amsterdam
      - CUSTOM_USER=USER
      - PASSWORD=FancyPasswordForUSER
    volumes:
      - /home/helixia/obsidian:/config
    ports:
      - 3030:3000
      - 3101:3001
    devices:
      - /dev/dri:/dev/dri #optional
    shm_size: "1gb"
    restart: unless-stopped
    The volume value will become important in the Syncthing atricle.
  6. Then click on Deploy stack
  7. The Docker container comes with a default username abc (with password abc) and you might wanne disable the account or change its password.
    Disabling the account: usermod -L -e 1 abc
    Changing the password: swith to the abs user and change the password.

Environment variables

If you are as new as me to Docker then you might notice some values which are unknow to you.
Below I will describe these variables.
- CUSTOM_USER + PASSWORD - Set an user and password if you would like to use your own username and password.
- security_opt: - seccomp: unconfined - If you are running on an older host system you need to enable this option to run modern GUI apps properly. I have set this option just in case although I run a modern mini-PC.
- volumes: - Remember that value to setup syncing.
- devices: - /dev/dri:/dev/dri - This will enable DRI3 GPU acceleration. Intel, AMD and Nvidia GPUs are supported.
- shm_size: "1gb" - This is needed for Obsidian to launch properly, because it is an Electron application.

Resources