Quartz (static site generator)
Quartz is a fast, batteries-included static-site generator (by jackyzha0) that turns a folder of Markdown — an Obsidian vault in particular — into a deployable website. It natively renders the affordances that make a vault feel like a vault: [[wikilinks]], transclusions, backlinks, graph view, full-text search, LaTeX, and popover previews, with SPA routing for fast page loads. Requires Node ≥ v22; build with npx quartz build, preview with --serve, deploy to GitHub Pages / Cloudflare / Netlify / Vercel. 1
Why it’s in this wiki
Nathan uses Quartz 4 to publish both of his vaults — remarks and this grimoire — as websites (journal conversation, 2026-08-11). It is the grimoire’s public-facing counterpart: the vault stays plain Markdown + git; Quartz compiles it for the web.
The vanilla-configuration lesson
A practice note from the same conversation, generalizable beyond Quartz: with a fast-moving upstream, confine customization to supported extension points. Nathan’s first Quartz deployment patched build files to get the look exactly right, and the maintenance burden of tracking upstream eventually killed the setup. The 2026 rebuild limits itself strictly to the configuration file plus custom.scss — accepting “not exactly what I want” in exchange for a site that survives upgrades. Fork-and-patch trades a one-time aesthetic win for a permanent rebase tax; the extension-point-only discipline is what makes a tool like this durable in personal infrastructure.
Related
- day-one-to-obsidian-conversion — sibling piece of Obsidian-adjacent personal infrastructure
- gemini-compatible-markdown — the other end of the publishing spectrum: minimal markup for the small web
- gempub-ebook-format — Markdown/gemtext → e-book container; same “plain text outlives platforms” ethos