Caleb Clay

Auto-updating Modified Dates in Obsidian with Git

1 min read

From Claude

Summary: Auto-updating Modified Dates in Obsidian with Git

We set up a git pre-commit hook that automatically updates the modified: date in your Obsidian notes’ frontmatter whenever you commit changes.

What we did:

  1. Identified your setup: Quartz repo at Projects/quartz with your Obsidian vault in the content/ subfolder
  2. Created a git hook at .git/hooks/pre-commit that:
    • Runs automatically before each commit
    • Finds all staged .md files in your content/ folder
    • Checks if they have a modified: field in frontmatter
    • Updates it to the current timestamp (ISO format)
    • Re-stages the files so the update is included in the commit
  3. Debugged syntax issues: Fixed grep regex and line break problems
  4. Ignored content/templates folder: Added grep -v '^content/templates/' to file
  5. Made it executable: chmod +x .git/hooks/pre-commit

Result:

Now every time you git commit, your modified: dates automatically update to reflect when you actually committed the changes - no manual work needed! Files without the modified: field are left untouched.

You kept published: as manual so you control when something is truly “published” vs just updated.

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