Publishing a snapshot

A snapshot is a folder of static pages written from your notes as they are at that moment. Anyone who opens it can read those notes and nothing else. It’s the way to hand a set of notes to someone who doesn’t have Varlig, or to read them yourself on a PC or a phone browser.

The sheet says it plainly before you publish: “A snapshot is a folder of static pages. Whoever opens it can read the notes and nothing else: the pages cannot be edited, they need no network, and they keep showing today’s text after you change the originals.”

What a snapshot is, and isn’t

A snapshot is a set of files. It’s pinned to the moment you wrote it: editing the original notes afterwards doesn’t change a single byte of a folder that was already written, and nothing in Varlig rewrites it in the background.

It is not a website, an account or a sync service:

• No accounts and no invitations. Whoever can open the folder can read it. There’s no login, no per-person access and no record of who read it.
• No revocation. Removing the folder stops new readers opening it from that location. It can’t reach a copy somebody has already downloaded, mailed on or put in a backup.
• No editing and no comments. The pages are documents. Reading them changes nothing in Varlig, and nothing in Varlig changes them.
• No hosting and no transport security. Varlig writes the folder; whatever carries it — a shared drive, a web server, a mail attachment — decides who can reach it.

Publish one

Three commands open the same sheet:

There’s no keyboard shortcut for any of them.

The sheet is headed Publish snapshot. Type a name in the Snapshot name field, check the preview, then choose Choose Folder… and pick where to write it. Cancel leaves everything as it was.

When it’s done, the result says Published 12 notes, gives the path, and adds: “Open index.html in any browser, here or on a phone. The pages are a snapshot: they will not change when you edit the notes, and they cannot be edited by whoever reads them. Removing the folder later stops new downloads; it cannot retract a copy somebody already has.” Show in Finder opens the folder, and Done closes the sheet.

Read the preview first

Nothing is written until you choose a folder, and the preview shows exactly what the folder will contain:

• Every note that will be published, with how many attachments it has and their total size.
• Not published — the notes left out, each with its reason: Locked note, Protected note or Protected tag — must stay in Varlig.
• Missing attachments (not published) — files the library can’t find. The result afterwards says how many were left out, down to “1 attachment was missing and was not published”.
• Every outgoing note link, with what the published page will do with it.

Underneath, a running total counts the notes, attachments and bytes, and says how many note links will be published as links and how many as plain text. If nothing in the selection can be published, the sheet says so and the button stays disabled.

Each link falls into one of three classifications:

The preview reads the notes again while the sheet is open, so a note you edit in another window is previewed — and published — as it stands now.

What is never published

Protected notes, notes carrying a protected tag and locked notes are never read and never published. Unlike an ordinary export, there is no Include unlocked protected notes choice here: publishing has no way to include them.

A link Varlig can’t rewrite inside the snapshot loses its address as well as its link styling, so a published page can never name, or point at, a note that wasn’t published. That covers [[Title|alias]] links, varlig:// and Bear note addresses, whose address would otherwise carry the unpublished note’s title, and tag links. Ordinary web addresses are untouched.

What the folder contains

Trip notes/
  index.html            the listing every reader starts from
  Trip-<UUID>.html      one page per note
  Packing-<UUID>.html
  assets/               images and files, shared by every page
  publication.json

The pages are the same rendering as an HTML export — calculation answers as in a rich export, images from assets/, code and diagrams as pictures — plus a phone-width viewport, a link back to index.html, and a footer dating the snapshot: “Published 16 September 2026. This is a snapshot: it shows the notes as they were on that date and does not change when they do. It cannot be edited here.”

There’s no script, no network request and no editing control of any kind, so the folder reads offline, after it’s been moved or copied, and on a phone screen.

publication.json records what was published: the varligPublication format version, the publication’s id, its name, created and updated dates, each note’s id, title, file and contentHash, and a manifest of the published files. A newer format version is refused rather than misread.

Update or remove a snapshot

Settings › Import & Export › Published snapshots lists every snapshot this library has written. Before you’ve written one it reads “No snapshots yet. Select notes and use File ▸ Publish Snapshot… to write a folder of read-only pages.”

Each row says whether the notes have moved on since — 3 notes changed, and separately 1 note no longer in the library — and offers three buttons:

An update is built beside its destination and moved into place, so a failure leaves the previous snapshot intact. Varlig removes a folder only when it still carries that publication’s own publication.json, so a folder you’ve moved or replaced yourself is left alone.

The Remove “Trip notes”? alert is clear about the limit of removing anything: “This deletes the published folder on this Mac and stops anybody opening it from there. Copies other people already downloaded stay with them: a published snapshot cannot be retracted.” The buttons are Cancel and Delete Folder.

The pane’s own footnote says the same thing: “A snapshot is a folder of read-only pages you can copy, mail or keep in a shared folder; it reads on a phone browser too. It is not an account: anybody with the folder can read it, and a copy somebody has downloaded cannot be taken back.”

For the other ways to get notes out of Varlig, see Import, export and backups.