Dynalist to Markdown

This is a script that exports Dynalist to Markdown. While it does generate standard Markdown, it was designed to export from Dynalist to Obsidian, and so it supports some Obsidian-specific features, such as internal links.

Installation

The script requires Python 3, as well as a few python modules, such as requests and pyyaml. I recommend creating a Python venv and installing modules in this environment. This details of how to do this depend on your platform. For example:

python3 -mvenv .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install requests pyyaml

Configuration

Navigate to the Dynalist developer page and Generate a secret token. Copy this secret token to your clipboard.

Copy the dynalist_to_markdown.yaml.example file to dynalist_to_markdown.yaml, and open dynalist_to_markdown.yaml with a text editor. Replace the <YOUR API KEY HERE> text with the secret token you just copied.

Additionally, you can define the configuration on a per-page basis. Since Dynalist is an outliner, each document is just a big nested list. While we could just convert this into a big nested Markdown list, that's probably not what you want.

[Note: A major weakness of the current implementation is that it only generates headings and list items -- never paragraphs. Hopefully a future version will provide this functionality.]

Edit the pages section of the dynalist_to_markdown.yaml config file, using the following configuration settings.

Key	Description
name	The name of the page to which these configuration settings apply. This can be a pattern, using a * to match any sequence of characters (or ? to match a single character).
heading_depth	The number of levels of headings to generate.
ignore	Ignore this page -- don't generate Markdown for it.
include_notes	Whether to include the "notes" section of a Dynalist item.
obsidian_internal_links	Whether to convert internal links to Obsidian-style notation (e.g. [[Link]])
page_header	Whether to generate a top-level header with the page name. You may want to enable this if you are not using the "Show inline title" option in Obsidian.

Usage

Once you've created the configuration file, you just simply run the script. There are a few optional command-line settings, however:

$ python dynalist_to_markdown.py -h
usage: dynalist_to_markdown.py [-h] [--config CONFIG] [--directory DIRECTORY]
                               [--overwrite] [--cache]

Export Dynalist to markdown

optional arguments:
  -h, --help             show this help message and exit
  --config CONFIG        Path to config file (default:
                         ./dynalist_to_markdown.yaml)
  --directory DIRECTORY  Directory for output (default: dynalist)
  --overwrite            Overwrite files in output directory
  --cache                Enable requests cache (useful for development)

By default, the script will create a folder called dynalist with all of the generated Markdown files. To change this folder name, use the --directory option.

If you plan to run the script multiple times (e.g. tweaking the configuration each time, or modifying the Python script), you may want to enable request caching. This enables you to run the script subsequent times without hitting the Dynalist API each time. To do this, install the requests_cache module and use the --cache option:

pip install requests_cache
python dynalist_to_markdown.py --cache