Understanding Templates

Templates used by Obsidian Web are written in the Handlebars template language -- see their guide to get an understanding of how Handlebars templates work.

Basic

A very simple content template might look like this:

## {{date}}
{{#if page.selectedText}}

{{quote page.selectedText}}
{{/if}}

This template will be merged with context data from your page (see below). For example, imagine it's November 12th, 2023 and you've selected this part of the page:

When rendered, this template will generate this output:

## 2023-11-12 14:14:24

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Context

When configuring a template, your template will be provided some context from the page you're currently viewing including:

Name	Description	Notes
page.url	URL of the page
page.title	Title of the page	From HTML <title>
page.selectedText	Text currently selected in the window	Processed with Readability
page.content	Full content of the loaded window	Processed with Readability
article.title	Article title (if available)	Provided by Readability
article.length	Length of the article in characters (if available)	Provided by Readability
article.excerpt	Article description or short excerpt from the content (if available)	Provided by Readability
article.byline	Author metadata (if available)	Provided by Readability
article.dir	Content direction (if available)	Provided by Readability
article.siteName	Name of the site (if available)	Provided by Readability

Helpers

Your template has access to all built-in helpers provided by Handlebars, but this plugin also provides you a handful of other useful helpers including:

Name	Description	Notes
quote	Quotes the provided variable	Inserts a > before each line of the variable so that it will be rendered as quoted text
date FORMAT	Render the current date using the provided variable FORMAT	See date-fns' format documentation for format options. If FORMAT is unspecified, uses yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss as a format.
filename NAME	Strip all filename-unsafe characters from variable NAME
json DATA	Format variable DATA as a JSON string
uuid	Return a randomly-generated UUID

In the above documentation, fields in all-caps like FORMAT, NAME, and DATA are assumed to be context variables -- if you want to provide data that is not stored in a context variable to a helper, you will need to use quotes. For example, if you would like to use the date helper described above to output the current date, but you would like to use the format EEEE, MMMM do instead of the default, you would need to enter {{ date "EEEE, MMMM do"}} in your template.