Intro to the Obsidian Digital Garden Tutorial Series

This introduction to the Obsidian Digital Garden is for a new tutorial series I decided to write. There aren’t many tutorials on this subject for people that don’t have coding knowledge so I am hoping to provide that for people. This will be broken up into several parts.

If you would like to skip through this, you can visit the Table of Contents on this post.

Note: You can click on any of the images throughout this tutorial to zoom into them to make them bigger.

During this process I will be creating a test digital garden using a blank test vault. If you want to fast forward to the vault already being created, then you can clone my obsidian test vault. That link provides you the process for doing that.

Part 1: Create an Obsidian Digital Garden

Step 1: Create an Obsidian Vault

You can skip this step if you have an existing Obsidian vault.

To start, you will want to download Obsidian and install the application on the device you are using. They are on every single operating system so it doesn’t matter where you install it. These tutorials will guide you through this regardless of the devices you have.

When you first open Obsidian you will see a page similar to the one I have below except your sidebar on the left will not contain any vaults. You will want to click the create button highlighted below.

Next, you will want to give the vault a name and figure out where you want to have the files. An Obsidian vault is just a folder full of files and I will show this below.

You can see my vault is in the F:\Obsidian directory on my computer. My vault name for this is going to be “Example Digital Garden”. Once you have this, click Create and you should be brought to this page:

Step 2: Enable Plugins & Install Obsidian Digital Garden Plugin

Now you will want to click on the gear icon in the bottom right to visit the Settings modal.

Next you will want to click on “Community Plugins” and then “Turn on Community Plugins”.

Following that, you will want to click on “Browse”.

From there, you will want to search for the “Digital Garden” plugin and click the purple install button. Once it is installed that button will then say “Enable”. Click that as well.

Next you can close out of this modal and it will take you back to the Settings modal and you should see Digital Garden in the bottom left.

Once you click on that you will be taken to a page that looks like below:

That brings us to…

Step 3: Create your first GitHub Repo

This is a very popular subject so I am going to link some resources and videos for you to watch on the subject.

• Official Documentation or This Official Documentation
• TheServerSide Tutorial
• Atlassian Tutorial
• Karl Broman Tutorial

Once you have that done, you have finished this first part! Woo hoo! Click here to go to Part 2 to learn how to sync your vault to multiple devices with all of the different ways or skip to Part 3 to set up your digital garden!