Sharing your Obsidian vault with different people

Most private publishing tools give you one lock for the whole door. Sidian gives you a lock for the door, each room, and individual drawers — so you can share exactly what each person should see without reorganizing your vault.

Three levels of access control

Site password — the outer gate. Anyone visiting your vault must enter this password before they see anything.

Folder password — per-directory access. Lock a folder so only people with that password can browse its contents, even if the rest of the site is public or already unlocked.

File password — per-note access. Lock a single note without touching anything around it.

These stack. A locked folder inside a password-protected site requires both passwords. A locked file inside an unlocked folder requires only the file password.

Use case: sharing project docs with a client

You maintain one vault with your own notes, project documentation, and client deliverables. You don't want to share everything — just what's relevant to each client.

Structure your vault like this:

My Vault/
├── Client A/
│   ├── Project Brief.md
│   ├── Deliverables.md
│   └── Budget.md
├── Client B/
│   └── ...
└── Internal/
    └── Margins.md

Set a folder password on Client A/ and share that password with your client. They can access everything inside that folder. Client B/ and Internal/ are invisible to them — not locked, not redirected, just inaccessible.

Use case: team wiki with a private section

Your team wiki is public internally — no site password needed. But one folder contains compensation data that only HR should see.

Team Wiki/
├── Engineering/
├── Design/
├── Onboarding/
└── HR/               ← folder password, HR only
    ├── Salaries.md
    └── Performance Reviews.md

Set a folder password on HR/. Everyone reads the rest of the wiki. HR opens their section with a separate password. No second site, no second vault, no duplication.

Use case: sharing one sensitive note

Sometimes it's not a whole folder — just one document. A contract, a proposal, a draft you want one specific person to review before it's ready to share more widely.

Set a file password directly on that note from your dashboard. Anyone with the note's direct URL sees a password prompt. Everyone else sees nothing different — the note doesn't appear in their nav or search results once it's locked.

How passwords work

Passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes — Sidian never stores them in plain text. When someone enters a correct password, they get an unlock token in an HTTP-only cookie that lasts 30 days. They won't be prompted again on the same device.

Changing a password immediately revokes all existing unlock tokens for that resource. Removing a password removes the gate entirely.

Setting it up

Open your site dashboard. For a folder, find the folder row and click Lock — enter a password and you're done. For a file, open the file settings in the dashboard and set a file password there.

No config files, no YAML frontmatter, no redeployment. The lock takes effect immediately on the next page load.