Here’s one way I figured out to publish an Obsidian vault as a static website using Hugo. This is a hard way: the easy way is to spend $100/yr on Obsidian Publish.

My requirements

I want to:

• Edit my content in Obsidian.
• Design and publish the web version with Hugo. I want to use Hugo but only because it’s the tool I know. I’m not sure it’s actually the best tool for this – as you’ll see below it has some warts that makes this more difficult than it might with other static site generators. But I know Hugo pretty well, and am happy enough with it despite its warts.
• Not have to worry about correct Hugo frontmatter (dates, titles, etc). I can edit these in Obsidian via its Properties feature, but I want that to be optional. I want to be able to work on stuff in Obsidian and not thing about the Hugo part at all (unless I want to).
• Publish automatically. I don’t want an explicit “commit” or “push” or “publish” step; I just want to write and have stuff appear on the web.

The components I chose

The various pieces I knitted together to make this happen are: