🌱 Automate Dendron Publishing

Posted on in hacking, pkm

I have been using Dendron for some time now as a PKM tool. I started when it was using 11ty to generate site out of the notes.

It would create the site in docs folder, using Dendron: Site Build in VSCode I had mapped the docs folder to a git repo.

I would push ready-made site to git, and netlify deploy was a no-op

%%{init: {'themeVariables':{'lineColor': 'lightblue', 'arrowheadColor': 'lightblue'}}}%% graph LR; A{ Write Content in markdown } A -->| git push | B[ source git repo ] A -->| Dendron: Site Build | C[ Site in `docs` folder ] C -->| git push | D[ netlify deploy ]

Then recently they switched to next.js and publishing changed a lot. (Personally I liked the old look and feel, but that is besides the point)

Now the .next/out would contain the Site.

It would have been OK, changing from docs to .next/out is no big deal, but with next-based publishing, out folder gets removed on each build. 😱

I had tough time figuring out how to publish (I did some hacks, but not really proud of those 😅)

Then I came across a blog post on Dendron’s discord channel.

Essentially they figured a way around this.

As a bonus, I don’t have to maintain two git repos like before (Remember, I had a git repo just for the generated output)

The steps from the script are pretty straightforward. Yet having such simple script and asking netlify to use it as a build command (and use docs folder to publish) does make the workflow more efficient.

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