stencil

CLI tool to export and transform Outline collections.

Warning

Outline will quickly rate-limit when exporting all your collections, stencil reuses exports in the last 10 mins by default to prevent this. You can force new exports or configure this cooldown.

Get Started

Setup

In Outline settings, create a new API token with at least these permissions

• collections.export_all
• fileOperations.info
• fileOperations.redirect

Set OUTLINE_URL and OUTLINE_TOKEN

export OUTLINE_URL=https://outline.example.com
export OUTLINE_TOKEN=hunter2

Exporting

Download all collections, including private collections and attachments

stencil pull --private --attachments <path>

Change the cooldown for reusing exports (e.g. reuse an export if one in the last 15 mins)

stencil pull --private --attachments --cooldown 15 <path>

Transforming

You can use stencil to convert/sanitize your Outline exports.

Warning

stencil is a WIP and might not cover every edge case, verify your site before deploying it to production. If you find a mismatch between Outline and your converted docs, feel free to open up an issue.

Here is every sanitization step with their respective flag

• Add H1 header into frontmatter --skip-frontmatter
• Convert Outline image dimension syntax to HTML tags --skip-image
• Convert notice blocks to Github style callouts --skip-noticeblocks
• Section index filename (e.g. _index.md for Hugo, index.md for Starlight/Docusaurus) --index-name

# Bootstrap a Hugo docs site with Hextra to quickly preview transformations.
stencil init ./my-hugo-site

# Standard Hugo / Hextra usage (all fixes enabled by default)
stencil convert ./export.zip ./my-hugo-site/content/docs
# Target Astro Starlight or Docusaurus
stencil convert --index-name index.md ./export.zip ./src/content/docs
# Raw export without modifying image syntax into HTML (e.g. Obsidian)
stencil convert --skip-image ./export.zip ./dest