Adventures With Templater for Obsidian

I’ve been experimenting more with how I can handle managing my small side projects in Obsidian. More on that another time, but one piece I wanted was the ability to quickly and easily scaffold out a new project—which for me is multiple directories with some default notes.

I found that Templater can run scripts when the file is created. This post was very helpful in getting me started, and helping me understand what might be possible. I was able to make a script that will create multiple folders and notes at once. Since Templater’s move and create_new functions cannot handle missing folders in a path, I needed to find a way to create folders. Luckily the Obsidian app is exposed and there is an API for that¹.

Here’s the final script in my template file:

<%*
 let projectName = await tp.system.prompt("Project Name")
 let projectPath = `Projects/${projectName}`
 let tasksPath = `Projects/${projectName}/Tasks`
 await app.vault.createFolder(projectPath)
 await app.vault.createFolder(tasksPath)
 let tasksFolder = app.vault.getAbstractFileByPath(tasksPath)
 
 await tp.file.move(`${projectPath}/${projectName}`)
 let tasksTemplate = await tp.file.find_tfile("Project Tasks (Template)")
 let tasks = tp.file.create_new(tasksTemplate, "Tasks", false, tasksFolder)
-%>

Here’s how it works:

1. I run the Templater: Create new note from template command and select my new project template.
2. New note created.
3. Asks for project name.
4. Creates necessary folders.
5. Moves new note to /Projects/Project Name, and renames it.
6. Creates a new tasks note in /Projects/Project Name/Tasks.

In short, the newly created note creates a new home for itself and moves itself in.

There might be an easier way to do this, but this seems like a pretty good way to start off. Templater seems pretty powerful and I’m going to keep looking into it and see how it can help in other areas.

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1. There is a request to add this functionality into Templater itself.↩︎

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