Export

A ZIP of your notes and the files they use — one note, a folder, a tag, or the whole vault — and any note as a standalone HTML page.

Your vault is a folder of Markdown files, and nothing Astrolabe does ever changes that. Copy the folder and you have a copy. Export is for the moments when a plain copy is the wrong shape: you want this folder and only the pictures it uses; or every note carrying a certain tag; or a copy whose [[wikilinks]] still work in a tool that does not understand them; or one note as a single page you can email to someone who has no vault at all.

Press Ctrl/Cmd P and run Export…, or right-click a folder in the tree and pick Export folder…. Both open the same small sheet. Export is for the admin only. A visitor to your site has the site; the archive never leaves your own server except into your own downloads folder.

The archive


What to export	This note, A folder (the tree's right-click starts here, on that folder; Choose… picks another, or the vault root), A tag (every note carrying it — inline `#tag` or frontmatter `tags:`, nested tags included), or The whole vault.
Attachments	Included takes every file the exported notes point at, by every route the reader honours: `![[embeds]]`, `![alt](Media/x.png)`, a note's `banner:`, a tracker's `cover:`, the svg beside an embedded drawing. Nothing else — an image no exported note uses stays behind. Notes only leaves them all out.
The paths inside	The vault's own: `Folder/Note.md`, `Media/cover.png`, whatever the scope. Unzip two exports into one folder and you have the vault's layout, not two competing ones. Arabic names survive — the archive marks every name as UTF-8.
The bytes	As on disk, unless you asked for standard links (below). Modification times are kept to the second. The archive is stored, not compressed: a vault's bulk is its pictures, which are already compressed, and the point of an export is fidelity.
The line under the controls	Before you download, the sheet asks the server what the same download would hold and prints it — 12 notes, 4 files · 3.2 MB — so a refusal is a sentence here rather than a failed download in your browser's list.
The cap	Two gigabytes. Above it the sheet says so and asks you to export a folder or a tag at a time.

The download is your browser's own — its progress bar, its downloads folder — and is named after what you exported and the day: Ideas 2026-09-14.zip, Reading 2026-09-14.zip, vault 2026-09-14.zip.

Links in the copies

Astrolabe's notes link to each other with [[wikilinks]] — double square brackets around a note's name — and so do Obsidian's. Most other Markdown tools (a static site generator, GitHub, a plain viewer) do not understand them. Links in the copies decides what the exported files carry:

Keep [[wikilinks]] — the default. The files are byte-for-byte what is on disk, which is the right export for another Astrolabe or Obsidian vault.
Standard Markdown links — every [[Note]], [[Note#Heading|label]] and ![[picture.png]] in the exported copies is rewritten to a relative link that works after unzipping: [Note](../Note.md), [label](../Note.md#heading), ![picture.png](Media/picture.png). Headings are turned into anchors the same way the reading view does it, so #My Heading becomes #my-heading. An embedded note (![[Other]]) has no standard equivalent and becomes a link to it.

Two honest limits. Your vault is never touched — the rewrite happens in the archive and nowhere else. And a link to a note that is not in the export stays exactly as written: a [Note](Note.md) pointing at a file that is not there would be worse than the [[Note]] you wrote, which at least says what it was. Code blocks and inline code are left alone for the same reason: a wikilink inside them is text about wikilinks, not a link.

One note as an HTML page

With This note selected, the sheet offers a second button, Export as HTML. It builds one .html file in your browser — nothing is asked of the server that reading the note does not already ask — and hands it to your downloads:

Rendered exactly as you read it. The same renderer as the reading view, with the properties card and the app's own controls left off, the way printing leaves them off.
Your theme, inlined. The colours, fonts and measures of the theme you are reading in are written into the page as CSS custom properties, along with the reading stylesheets themselves. Open it anywhere and it looks like your Astrolabe.
Pictures inside the file. Every image the note shows is fetched and written into the page itself as text (a data URI), so the page is complete on its own. One that cannot be fetched — or one above 25 MB — keeps its address instead, as an absolute URL: it still shows next to a running instance, and is an honest broken image away from one. It is never silently dropped.
Right-to-left when the note is. The page's direction follows the note's prose, or the dir: its frontmatter pins.

Math is rendered, tracker and sigil cards are drawn (without their buttons), and a .tex note comes out as the page its reading view shows.

From the command line

The sheet is a front for one route, which curl can call with an admin session cookie:

GET /api/export?scope=note|folder|tag|vault&target=<path or tag>&links=wiki|relative&attachments=1|0

scope=vault needs no target. Add &dry=1 for the JSON the sheet's summary line is made of — { notes, attachments, bytes, filename } — with the same refusals: 404 exportEmpty when nothing matches, 413 exportTooLarge above the cap, 401 without an admin session. See Backup & sync for the other way out of the vault — the one that keeps history.