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Setting Up My Second Brain

June 8, 2026

I wanted a system where I could write privately, publish selectively, and set it all up on any new machine in one command. Here’s what I built.

The architecture

~/brain/           ← local Obsidian vault, private, never pushed to GitHub
      ↓  publish.sh (manual, when ready)
~/code/shekhar/    ← public Astro site on GitHub → auto-deploys to Cloudflare Pages
  • Notes with publish: true in frontmatter get copied to the site
  • Everything else stays private forever
  • One git push = site deploys

Stack

  • Obsidian — writing, free
  • Astro — static site generator, markdown-native
  • Cloudflare Pages — hosting, auto-deploys on git push
  • Templater — Obsidian plugin, auto-fills frontmatter on new notes via folder templates (blogs/ → blog template, learnings/ → learning template). Date fills automatically, title you type once.

Folder structure

~/brain/
├── blogs/          ← blog drafts
├── learnings/      ← learning notes
├── templates/
│   ├── blog.md     ← auto-applied when creating in blogs/
│   └── learning.md ← auto-applied when creating in learnings/
└── publish.sh      ← copies publish:true notes to site repo + pushes

~/code/shekhar/
├── src/content/
│   ├── blogs/      ← published posts (copied by publish.sh)
│   └── learnings/  ← published notes (copied by publish.sh)
├── setup.sh        ← one-time machine setup
└── publish.sh      ← source of truth for the publish script

Daily workflow

  1. Create a file in blogs/ or learnings/
  2. Frontmatter auto-fills — date is today, publish: false, title is blank for you to type
  3. Write freely — stays private until you say otherwise
  4. When ready: change publish: false → publish: true
  5. Run bash ~/brain/publish.sh → live in ~30 seconds

Setting up on a new machine

Step 1 — Obsidian (manual, one-time):

  1. Download Obsidian from https://obsidian.md
  2. Open Obsidian → Settings → Community plugins → disable Safe mode
  3. Browse → search “Templater” → Install → Enable
  4. Quit Obsidian (Cmd+Q)

Step 2 — everything else (automated):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ShekharDhangar/shekhar/main/setup.sh | bash

This installs Node.js, clones the site repo, creates the brain folder structure, copies templates, and pre-configures Templater with folder templates.

Step 3: Open Obsidian → open ~/brain as vault → start writing.