How I Blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare – Zero Cost, Fully Owned

Summary

I’ve been using Obsidian for all my writing lately, and it’s been a game changer. The local-first model means everything lives as plain text on my machine, and with the Minimal theme, the interface stays clean and distraction-free. My vault lives in iCloud (Dropbox or Google Drive work too), so notes sync seamlessly across devices - I often start drafts on my phone and finish them later on my laptop. For publishing, I use Hugo with the Bear Blog theme (fast, minimal), and deploy via GitHub and Cloudflare Pages. This stack gives me full control: no subscriptions, no vendor lock-in, and no risk of platforms disappearing or changing policies. If you: Use (or want to try) Obsidian Don’t mind a bit of technical setup Prefer writing in plain text with Git-based version control Want a fast, cost-free, portable publishing flow Then this setup might be exactly what you’re looking for. Once set up, publishing is as simple as toggling a draft flag and pushing to GitHub. Setting Up Your System This post is a high-level outline of how it all fits together. It’s not a tutorial, but if you’re familiar with basic dev tools, it should be easy to follow. And if anything’s unclear, LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude are great for filling in the gaps. 1. Install and Set Up Hugo First, you’ll need to install Hugo on your machine. Once installed, create a new site: hugo new site myblog cd myblog Then add the Bear Blog theme (or your preferred theme): git init git submodule add https://github.com/janraasch/hugo-bearblog.git themes/hugo-bearblog Update your config.toml file to use the theme. See the Bear Blog theme documentation for configuration options. 2. Connect Obsidian to Hugo This is the key part. Hugo has a specific folder structure, and you want to write your posts in the content folder. Inside that folder, I created a blog subfolder for all my posts. So my folder structure looks like this: myblog/ ├── content/ │ ├── blog/ <- This is where I write my posts │ └── ... └── ... To set up Obs...