Configuration

Dendron lets you control publication behavior at three levels:

• globally through dendron.yml configuration
• per note through the publication related frontmatter
• per line through custom dendron directives inside the note

Global Configuration

The dendron.yml configuration file controls what notes get published. It is located at the root of your workspace.

.
└── {workspace}
    └── dendron.yml

Below is the config that is used to publish dendron.so from the contents of this repo

site:
  siteHierarchies: [dendron]
  siteRootDir: docs

Properties

assetsPrefix?:

Prefix for assets.

• NOTE: By default, assets are served from the root. If you are publishing to github pages and followed the instructions here by creating a repo named {username}.github.io, then no further action is needed. This is because github will make your site available at https://{username}.github.io. If you created a custom repo, you will need to set the prefix to the name of your repo because github will make your site available at https://username.github.io/{your-repo-name/}

copyAssets

• required: no
• type: boolean
• default: true

Copy assets from vault to site.

siteHierarchies: str[]

List of hierarchies to publish

siteIndex?: str

• optional, path of your index (home page)
• defaults to the first element of siteHierarchies

siteRootDir

Location of the directory where site will be build. Relative to your workspace

siteRepoDir

• required: no
• type: string

Location of the github repo where your site notes are located. By default, this is assumed to be your workspaceRoot if not set. This is used with the Publish Notes command

usePrettyRefs

• default: True

Whether to use pretty note refs or plain refs.

config

Per hierarchy specific config. To set options for all hierarchies, set {hiearchy name} to root.

config:
  {hierarchy name}: {hierarchy options}

The list of possible options:

• publishByDefault: boolean, default: true
  • if set to false, dendron will only publish notes within the hierarchy that have published: true set in the frontmatter
• noindexByDefault: boolean, default: false
  • if set to true, dendron will add the following meta tag <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow”> which will tell google to not index your page
  • when google indexes a page, it will penalize sites that have duplicate content from other sites. this is useful if you are using your hiearchy as a cache
• customFrontmatter: list, default: []
  • if set, dendron will add the specified frontmatter to each published note in the hierarchy. note that this will override existing keys with the same name when publishing
  • eg. add toc: true to all notes published under the iam.* hierarchy

    config:
      iam: 
          customFrontmatter: [
            {
              key: "toc",
              value: true,
            }
          ]
  

Examples

Blog

Below is the config for kevinslin.com. It publishes everything under the home and blog hierarchies but will only publish notes under books if published: true is set on the frontmatter.

• dendron.yml

site:
  siteHierarchies: [home, blog, books]
  siteRootDir: docs
  config:
    books:
      publishByDefault: false

Example publishing entire vault

• vault

.
├── root.md
├── dendron.md
├── dendron.quickstart.md
├── dendron.zen.md
├── flowers.md
└── flowers.bud.md

• dendron.yml

publish:
  siteHierarchies: [root]

• what gets published

.
└── root.md
    ├── dendron
    │   ├── dendron.quickstart
    │   └── dendron.zen
    └── flowers
        └── flowers.bud

Example publishing just one domain

• vault

.
├── root.md
├── dendron.md
├── dendron.quickstart.md
└── dendron.zen.md

• dendron.yml

publish:
  siteHierarchies: [dendron]

• published:

.
└── dendron
    ├── dendron.quickstart
    └── dendron.zen

Note Configuration

You can specify how notes are published via the frontmatter of each note.

Properties

published

• type: boolean
• default: true

To exclude a page from publication, you can add the following to the frontmatter. If you set publishByDefault: false for a hierarchy, this needs to be set to true to publish

...
published: false

noindex

• type: boolean
• default: true

To tell google to not index a page, you can add the following tag to the frontmatter. You can also have this as a default for a given hierarchy by setting noIndexByDefault: true in the site config.

...
noindex: true

toc

• type: boolean
• default: false

To generate a table of contents in a given note, enable this directive in the note frontmatter.

toc: true

You will also need to include the following line somewhere in the note body. Dendron will generate a table of contents when it finds that particular header

## Table of Contents

The output will look like the below.

• NOTE: in order to generate a table of contents, the heading levels after ToC need to be at an equal level or greater than the heading level of Table of Contents
  • this is okay

  ## Table of Contents
  ## Header1
  ## Header2
  

  • this is not

  ## Table of Contents
  ### Header1
  ### Header2
  

Line Configuration

You can control publication on a per line basis.

Properties

LOCAL_ONLY_LINE

`

Hello World!  <!-- Will be published -->

 <!-- won't be published -->