How to sync your Ghost blog with Obsidian

If you live in Obsidian and publish on Ghost, there’s an obvious gap: your notes are in your vault, but your blog is locked inside the Ghost editor. You end up copying back and forth, or drafting in Obsidian and never touching the post again once it’s live. A real ghost obsidian sync closes that gap — your published posts become notes you can edit alongside everything else, and your edits flow back to the live blog.

That’s what Specter does. It’s a small native macOS menu-bar app that keeps a folder of local markdown in two-way sync with Ghost. Point that folder at a subfolder inside your vault, and your blog becomes part of your Obsidian workspace.

Why this is worth doing

Once your Ghost posts live in your vault, the whole blog is just notes. You can link a post to your research notes, search across drafts and published work in one place, and fix a typo on a live article without opening a browser. There’s no separate “blogging mode” — you write and edit your blog the same way you write everything else.

And because it’s two-way, the vault and Ghost stay honest with each other. Edit a paragraph in Obsidian and it pushes to Ghost. Fix a headline in the Ghost editor on your phone and it pulls back into your vault. Neither copy quietly drifts out of date.

How coexistence works

Specter writes plain .md files with a YAML frontmatter block at the top — exactly the format Obsidian already understands. There’s no proprietary container and no database. The frontmatter carries the post’s metadata:

• title — the post title
• tags — your Ghost tags
• status — draft or published
• the feature image URL
• the custom excerpt

Below that, the body is your post as ordinary markdown. Obsidian reads these files natively, and Specter only manages the markdown files it knows about, so the two never step on each other. Your other notes, attachments, and plugins are untouched.

Setting it up

The setup is short:

1. Get your Ghost Admin API key. Specter needs this to read and write your posts. It’s in id:secret format and is not the same as the Content API key — here’s how to get your Ghost Admin API key.
2. Connect Specter and pick your folder. Walk through connecting Specter to Ghost. When it asks for a local folder, choose a subfolder inside your vault — something like Vault/Blog. Keeping posts in their own subfolder keeps them tidy and separate from your other notes.
3. Run the first sync. This is a pull: Specter reads your existing Ghost posts and writes each one to that subfolder as markdown. Use the dry-run preview first to see exactly what it will create before anything touches disk.

Open your vault and the posts are there as notes. Edit them, and Specter syncs the changes back to Ghost on the next run.

What syncs, and what doesn’t

Specter syncs posts only. It does not pull or push images, themes, members, or newsletters. Feature images come through as URLs in frontmatter rather than downloaded files, so your vault stays light and you keep using Ghost for media and theming. Specter is the bridge between your writing and your live blog — it doesn’t replace Obsidian or Ghost, it connects them.

Because both sides can change, Specter guards against collisions with conflict prompts: if the Ghost copy and your local note both changed since the last sync, it stops and asks which version to keep instead of overwriting either one. Paired with the dry-run preview, a sync never clobbers your work without telling you.

Coming from the old Obsidian plugin?

If you’ve been using the Obsidian Ghost Publish plugin (or a “Send to Ghost” fork), this is a two-way upgrade. That plugin is a one-way publish button — it pushes a note to Ghost but never brings your existing posts down or reconciles edits made on both sides. See the full Specter vs the Obsidian Ghost Publish plugin comparison, and when you’re ready, how to migrate from the Obsidian Ghost plugin.

Then point AI at the folder

Specter has no built-in AI — you bring your own. Once your whole blog is plain markdown in your vault, you can run a tool like Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini over that folder to rewrite intros, generate meta descriptions, or enforce a style guide across every post, then preview the diff and sync it all back. See editing Ghost posts with Claude.

The result is a single workspace: your vault and your live Ghost blog, kept in step, both ways, on plain files you fully control.