Running Obsidian on ChromeOS with Docker

Why Obsidian-Remote?

The initial reason that drew me to Obsidian-Remote was that I needed a way to run it on an old laptop loaded up with ChromeOS Flex. Sure I could set up the linux environment for ChromeOS and set up Obsidian from there, but being an old laptop it tended to heat up and stutter, so I went looking. This works great for niche needs like that, or environments where you don’t want to or can’t install your own local version. With that, let’s dive in.

Creating the Docker image

• Clone the Repo

    git clone https://github.com/sytone/obsidian-remote.git
    cd obsidian-remote
  

• Modify the Dockerfile Open the Dockerfile to edit

    nano Dockerfile
  

  And make the following change from

    ARG OBSIDIAN_VERSION=1.3.5
  

  to the latest version, as of writing this is 1.4.12

    ARG OBSIDIAN_VERSION=1.4.12
  

• Now let’s build it

    docker build --pull --rm -f "Dockerfile" -t obsidian-remote:latest "."
  

Now to get the instance running

• Create a data folder

    mkdir ~/obsidian-remote-data
    cd obsidian-remote-data
    mkdir config
    mkdir vaults
  

  NOTE: If you have an existing vault you can drop the files in ~/obsidian-remote-data/vaults

• Next, we’ll create a docker-compose.yml file

    nano docker-compose.yaml
  

  Paste in the following

    services:
    obsidian:
        image: 'obsidian-remote:latest'
        container_name: obsidian-remote
        restart: unless-stopped
        ports:
            - 8080:8080
        volumes:
            - /root/obsidian-remote-data/vaults:/vaults
            - /root/obsidian-remote-data/config:/config
        environment:
            - TZ=America/Chicago
  

• Then run:

    docker compose up -d
  

• Open the then open http://remote-ip-here:8080

That’s it

This should be customizable just like regular Obsidian and, with the exception of git, should handle all your regular plugins. Have fun and till next time, fair winds and following seas.

Sources

REF: https://github.com/sytone/obsidian-remote#building-locally