Hexo Send

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Keep writing in Obsidian and let Hexo Send handle the repetitive work of preparing posts for Hexo. 📝

Hexo Send is a desktop-only plugin that pre-releases selected Markdown files, folders, or multiple selections to a local Hexo repository. It organizes images, validates the generated site, and creates one local Git commit. It never pushes without an additional confirmation, never runs hexo deploy, and does not monitor GitHub Actions. 🛡️

✨ Features

• 📂 Pre-release one note, a folder, multiple file-tree selections, or the active note.
• 🏷️ Confirm the category and edit tags, keywords, descriptions, and image alt text before writing anything.
• 🖼️ Copy local images to /images/<abbrlink>/ and populate cover and top-image metadata.
• 🔍 Detect Hexo, Node.js, Git, category mappings, and abbrlink configuration.
• 🤖 Optionally suggest metadata through a user-configured OpenAI-compatible endpoint. All core features work without AI.
• ✅ Run two Hexo validation passes, stage only the planned post and image paths, and create exactly one commit.
• 🚦 Show “Committed, not pushed” after success. Push occurs only after the user explicitly confirms it.

📋 Requirements

• Desktop Obsidian 1.13.0 or later.
• A trusted local Hexo Git repository with its dependencies already installed.
• A repository-local Hexo CLI at node_modules/hexo/bin/hexo and a configured hexo-abbrlink package.
• Node.js and Git available on the desktop system.

Hexo Send does not use npx to download or execute a missing Hexo installation. If the local CLI is absent, environment detection blocks the pre-release and asks you to install the repository dependencies yourself.

📥 Installation

Community plugin directory

After the plugin is accepted, open Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search for Hexo Send, and install it. 🎉

Beta or manual installation

• With BRAT, add FountainChan/obsidian-hexo-send as a beta plugin.
• For manual installation, download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the same GitHub release, place them in <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/hexo-send/, reload Obsidian, and enable the plugin.

🧭 Usage

1. Set the local Hexo repository path in the plugin settings and run environment detection.
2. Right-click a Markdown file, folder, or selection and choose Pre-release to Hexo….
3. Review the title, category, tags, keywords, description, image alt text, and conflict actions.
4. Select Generate and commit. A successful job stops at Committed, not pushed.
5. Select Push only when you want to send that commit to the configured Git remote.

🔐 Security, privacy, and privileged capabilities

Hexo Send is desktop-only because its core workflow intentionally connects Obsidian to a local Hexo toolchain. The Community directory may display filesystem and process-execution warnings for these capabilities.

Direct filesystem access

• The plugin uses Node.js filesystem APIs to read and write the local Hexo repository explicitly selected by the user.
• It reads source notes through the Obsidian Vault API and may read selected Vault attachments so they can be copied into the Hexo repository. Source notes are never modified.
• Crash-recovery journals and file backups are stored under the operating system's temporary directory.
• Repository-relative paths are normalized and checked against traversal, directory links, and final-target symbolic links before reads, writes, copies, or recovery operations.
• Git staging is verified against an exact allowlist. The plugin never runs git add ..

Process execution

• The plugin starts Git and Node.js resolved from the system PATH. Executable lookup does not use the selected repository as a search location. Node.js runs only the Hexo CLI installed inside that repository.
• Remote images are downloaded with a streaming Node.js HTTP(S) client that pins each validated public IP and revalidates every redirect.
• Processes are started with shell: false and separate argument arrays. User content is never concatenated into a shell command.
• Hexo plugins, Hexo themes, and Git hooks are executable code. Use only repositories, dependencies, and hooks that you trust.
• The plugin runs hexo clean, hexo generate --bail, and narrowly scoped Git inspection, staging, commit, and push commands. git push is available only after explicit confirmation.

Clipboard

The plugin does not call the system Clipboard API. Diagnostic details are displayed in a read-only text area; copying is performed manually by the user with the normal operating-system shortcut.

Network and AI

• Remote images are downloaded only when referenced by a selected article. Localhost, private-network addresses, unsafe redirects, non-image responses, and files larger than 20 MB are rejected.
• Git connects to the configured remote only after the user selects Push.
• When optional AI assistance is enabled, the full article body together with candidate categories and tags is sent to the user-configured OpenAI-compatible endpoint. The API key is stored only in Obsidian SecretStorage.
• The plugin contains no client-side telemetry, ads, or self-update mechanism.

🧰 Development

npm install
npm run verify

Useful commands:

• npm run lint
• npm run typecheck
• npm test
• npm run build
• npm run verify
• npm run package

🎁 Releases

Push a tag that exactly matches the versions in package.json and manifest.json, without a v prefix. GitHub Actions runs the full quality gate, generates build provenance, and publishes only the three assets supported by Obsidian:

• main.js
• manifest.json
• styles.css

📄 License

Hexo Send is released under the MIT License.

The technical design is documented in docs/plans/2026-08-08-technical-development-plan.md.