Markport

Obsidian, running in your browser

Obsidian's own renderer - the real one, byte-for-byte unmodified - with every Electron and Capacitor dependency replaced by browser-native shims.

Run it yourself A few minutes, on your own machine

Markport is an independent project. It is not made by, affiliated with, or endorsed by Obsidian. There is no public instance - see below for why.

Where your notes live

Two options, and neither one involves a server.

A real folder on your computer

Point Markport at any directory and it reads and writes that directory directly, through the browser’s File System Access API. Your notes stay ordinary Markdown files on your disk - open them in any other editor, back them up, sync them with whatever you already use. Nothing is copied into the browser, and the browser cannot see anything outside the folder you picked. Chromium-based browsers only.

Inside the browser

If you would rather not grant folder access, vaults can live in OPFS - private to you, never uploaded, never shared between visitors. They survive a reload and stay until you clear that site’s browsing data. Works in every modern browser.

There is also an optional sync server you can run yourself - pull-only, read-only, no encryption. Not ready for real use yet.

One exception: requests to github.com, githubusercontent.com and obsidian.md - installing a community plugin, and the deprecated-plugin check Obsidian itself makes at vault load - pass through a small proxy, because a browser cannot reach those hosts directly. Your notes are never part of that. A sync server you connect yourself is a direct connection and is never proxied.

Zero patches to Obsidian’s bundle

app.js is served exactly as Obsidian ships it - verified by checksum against the official Android bundle. Nothing is rewritten at build time. Platform behaviour (desktop vs. mobile layout) is adjusted at runtime, through a shim that captures Obsidian’s own Platform object instead of editing its source. This repository does not contain or redistribute that bundle.

What works

Full Markdown editing and live preview, powered by Obsidian’s own renderer
File tree, tabs, split panes, graph view
Wikilinks, backlinks, tags, search, command palette
Core plugins, and community plugins installed from within the app
Folder vaults, or browser-local storage - see above
RTL and full Unicode

What does not work

Plugins that need real Node APIs - spawning processes, reaching outside the vault. Plugins written against the mobile-safe API generally work.
Folder vaults - Chromium only; Firefox and Safari do not implement the directory picker.
Auto-refresh on external file changes - Chromium only; elsewhere it refreshes when the tab regains focus.
An insecure origin. Browser storage is unavailable without https:// (or localhost), and vault creation fails silently on a bare-IP host.

Obsidian 1.13

Obsidian 1.13 and newer. Markport is pinned to 1.12.7. Starting with 1.13, Obsidian asks its host environment for a terms field carrying a verbatim acknowledgement before it initialises. The acknowledgement sits on both sides - one supplies it, the other compares against its own copy (illustrative, not exact).

On mobile, through Capacitor’s App plugin:

const ACKNOWLEDGEMENT = "I understand and agree that I am not allowed to … granted by the Obsidian team.";

// ### Platform side ###
// The string is compiled into classes.dex and served through Capacitor's App plugin
App.getInfo = () => ({
  name: 'Obsidian', id: 'md.obsidian', build: '…', version: '1.13.4',
  terms: ACKNOWLEDGEMENT,
});

// ### Client side ###
const appInfo = await App.getInfo();
Platform.build   = appInfo.build;
Platform.version = appInfo.version;

// …

if (ACKNOWLEDGEMENT !== appInfo.terms) throw new Error();

On desktop, the same value over IPC - in the same run that reads version and resources:

const ACKNOWLEDGEMENT = "I understand and agree that I am not allowed to … granted by the Obsidian team.";

// ### Platform side ###
electron.ipcMain.on("terms",         e => { e.returnValue = ACKNOWLEDGEMENT }),
electron.ipcMain.on("documents-dir", e => { e.returnValue = documentsDir }),
electron.ipcMain.on("resources",     e => { e.returnValue = resourcesPath }),
electron.ipcMain.on("version",       e => { e.returnValue = appVersion }),

// ### Client side ###
Platform.version = electron.ipcRenderer.sendSync("version");
Platform.build   = electron.remote.app.getVersion();

// …

const termsFromIPC = electron.ipcRenderer.sendSync("terms");

if (ACKNOWLEDGEMENT !== termsFromIPC) return window.close();

Browser support

Capability	Chromium	Firefox	Safari
Vault storage - read	✅	✅	✅
Vault storage - write	✅	✅	⚠️
Folder vaults	✅	❌	❌
Auto-refresh on external change	✅	❌	❌

Chromium gives the complete experience. Safari shipped OPFS writes much later than reads - check your version. A secure context (https:// or localhost) is required everywhere.

There is no public instance

There is no public deployment. The code is here to demonstrate the idea. This repository does not contain or redistribute Obsidian’s bundle - if you want it, you can download it from Obsidian, onto your own machine.

Run it yourself

Two deployment modes.

A fully client-side static build - any static host such as Vercel or Cloudflare Pages, or just a folder on your own machine.
An optional Node.js server that stores vaults as real files on disk and pushes live updates to the client.

Both run the same browser-side core.

Setup instructions →