Obsidian Tools

These are a bunch of random tools I've found useful with Obsidian + Github sync (the latter is required for these to work).

Right now there are three main things it does:

Email to Obsidian: Set up an email address that can catch emails and add
them as notes to your Obsidian.
Daily Summaries: Writes a Daily Summary note each day of your new notes +
changes.
Weekly Sumary: Writes a weekly summary note each week from your Daily
Summaries.

Runs on Vercel with the help of a few other services.

Example Summaries

To give you a sense, here's the structure of the Daily and Weekly Summaries:

Daily Summaries

Daily Summaries are automatically generated each day and provide a concise overview of the day's activities, insights, and key information. They typically include:

Overall Summary: A brief paragraph summarizing the main events, discussions, and developments of the day.
Interesting Ideas: A bullet-point list of noteworthy concepts or thoughts that emerged during the day.
Common Themes: Recurring topics or patterns observed across various activities or discussions.
Questions for Exploration: Open-ended questions or areas identified for further investigation.
Possible Next Steps: Actionable items or potential follow-up tasks based on the day's events.
Notes: Detailed breakdowns of specific meetings, conversations, or activities that occurred during the day.
URLs: A list of relevant links mentioned or accessed during the day, with brief descriptions of their content.

Weekly Summaries

Weekly Summaries are generated at the end of each week, providing a higher-level overview of the week's activities and insights. They typically include:

Overall Summary: A comprehensive paragraph or two summarizing the main themes, developments, and achievements of the week.
Strategic Implications: Key insights or decisions that could have long-term impacts on projects or strategies.
Challenges & Opportunities: A breakdown of obstacles faced and potential areas for growth or improvement identified during the week.
Key Developments & Trends: Significant progress made on projects or notable trends observed in the industry or work environment.
Long Term Implications: Potential long-range effects of the week's events or decisions on future projects or strategies.
Goals for Next Week: Specific objectives or tasks to focus on in the coming week, based on the current week's outcomes.

These summaries serve as a quick reference for tracking progress, identifying patterns, and maintaining focus on important goals and ideas over time.

Required Services

Inbound Email: Postmark (You could also probably use
something else, as long as it can take an email and make it a webhook.)
Github: This is how we write to Obsidian, so you have to have Github syncing
on for your Obsidian. This is reasonably straightforward with
obsidian-git installed.
Hosting: Vercel is the easiest way to host this thing.
Redis/Queue: Upstash will be needed for their Qstash
queue service and for their Redis serverless. Create a new Redis DB and a
Qstash queue and put the variables in the env file.

Setting up Google Calendar Integration

To use the Google Calendar integration, we'll set up a Google Cloud service account. Follow these steps:

Go to the Google Cloud Console.
Create a new project or select an existing one.
Enable the Google Calendar API for your project.
Go to "IAM & Admin" > "Service Accounts".
Click "Create Service Account".
Give it a name (e.g., "Obsidian Tools"), and click "Create".
For the role, you can select "Project" > "Editor" for full access, or choose
a more restrictive role if preferred.
Click "Continue" and then "Done".
Find your new service account in the list and click on it.
Go to the "Keys" tab and click "Add Key" > "Create new key".
Choose JSON as the key type and click "Create". This will download a JSON
file with your credentials.

Now, set up your environment variables:

Open the downloaded JSON file.
In your .env file, add the following:
```
GOOGLE_CLIENT_EMAIL=your-service-account-email@your-project.iam.gserviceaccount.com
GOOGLE_PRIVATE_KEY="-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----\nYour Private Key Here\n-----END PRIVATE KEY-----\n"
[email protected]
```
Replace [email protected] with the client_email from your JSON file. For the GOOGLE_PRIVATE_KEY, copy the entire private key from the JSON file, including the "-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----" and "-----END PRIVATE KEY-----" parts. Set CALENDAR_NAME to the email address of the Google Calendar you want to access.
Share your calendar:
- Go to your Google Calendar
- Find the calendar you want to access under "My calendars"
- Click the three dots next to the calendar name and select "Settings and
  sharing"
- Scroll down to "Share with specific people"
- Click "Add people" and enter your service account email
- Set the permission to "Make changes to events" or "See all event details"
  depending on your needs

Remember to never commit your .env file to version control. If deploying to Vercel, add these environment variables in your Vercel project settings.

Optional Services

Proxy: I like IPRoyal for proxy. This helps with
scraping a lot, but it's optional.

Setting up your env file

Copy the env.example file to .env and fill in whatever you need.

SECRET_KEY is currently used by Postmark for emails.
CRON_SECRET is used by Vercel for daily summaries.
YOUR_NAME and YOUR_BIO are used in the prompt.

Setting Up Inbound Email > Obsidian

If you're using Postmark:

Sign up for an account
Create a secret key to use with Postmark, put this in your .env file under
SECRET_KEY. If you want something simple, just
generate a UUID. It's not world class
security, but it will get the job done.
Create a server
Click Default Inbound Stream
Under "Set your server's inbound webhook URL" add your url. It should be
whatever URL you're using in dev or production +
/api/email?token=SECRET_KEY (make sure to add your SECRET_KEY from step
2).
Save changes
Either grab the server's inbound address from that page, or head to settings
to set up a custom domain address like [email protected]

Running Obsidian Tools Locally

Starting the local server

First, run the development server:

npm run dev
# or
yarn dev
# or
pnpm dev
# or
bun dev

Open http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the result.

This project uses next/font to automatically optimize and load Inter, a custom Google Font.

Setup Cloudflare Tunnel

For local development, you can set up a Cloudflare tunnel that you can call from airtable. I like the instructions here.

You'll need to be a Cloudflare user with a domain pointing there (it's free to use their DNS servies). If you want to use another tunnel service, go for it. This doesn't matter except for testing.

Setup the CLI

brew install cloudflare/cloudflare/cloudflared

Then:

cloudflared tunnel login

Create the Tunnel

cloudflared tunnel create <Tunnel-NAME>

After that, point the subdomain to the tunnel:

cloudflared tunnel route dns <Tunnel-NAME> <SUBDOMAIN>

Setup the Tunnel in the App

First, create a new folder at the root of the app called .cloudflared.

Second, on your computer, find ~/.cloudflared/<Tunnel-UUID>.json and copy that file to the .cloudflared folder we just created. After it's copied, make sure you rename it credentials.json.

Third, create a file in that folder called config.yml with the following info:

tunnel: <Tunnel-UUID>
credentials-file: .cloudflared/credentials.json
noTLSVerify: true

Finally, give bin/tunnel execute permissions:

chmod +x bin/tunnel

Run Your Tunnel

Assuming your app is already running (if it's not, npm run dev), then all you need to do is run:

bin/tunnel <port>

For example, if it's running on 3000 (default) you would run bin/tunnel 3000 in a new terminal window and everything should be good to go. Test it out by going to the domain you entered and you should see the homepage for the app (it just says "airtable helpers" if you haven't changed anything).