Accounts
An Observable account makes it possible for you to use the Observable platform and collaborate with others.
Create an account
To get started, click the Sign up button on https://www.observablehq.com.
Note
If you fork a notebook before you have created an account, you will be asked to sign up to save your fork; the dialog box will look very similar to the one below.
Continue with... (or email)
After you click Sign Up, you are asked to select an authentication provider. You can choose from several organizations where you may already have an account.
If you choose to sign up with your email address, you'll receive an email link from notifications@mail.observablehq.com
to confirm your email address. (If you do not see the email, be sure to check your spam folder.)
Create your display name
After choosing an authentication method, you'll see the Welcome to Observable screen where you enter your display name.
Your account profile consists of the following items:
- Avatar: Every user on Observable has an avatar, which either gets auto-populated from your authentication provider or generated by Observable. If you want to change your avatar after signup, go to your Settings and scroll down to Personal profile. You will see a link to upload your own avatar image.
- Display name: This is the name you entered at signup, and appears on notebooks that you create. You can change your display name at any time by going to your Settings and scrolling down to Personal profile. You will see a form to change your display name.
- Username: Your username was auto-assigned at signup. This name will be used in the URLs for your notebooks. You can change this name once by going to your Settings and clicking the Change username button. Note that this does not 'free up' your existing username, since you may have shared links with this username.
Delete an account
Note
Deleting your Observable account means that all of the following will be removed:
- Your authenticated identities/user IDs.
- Your notebooks.
- Your comments in notebooks.
- Your metadata such as secrets, database connections, etc.
In addition, you will be removed from any Observable teams that you are a member of.
Please be certain that you do want to delete your account before proceeding.
You can delete your Observable account from your Settings page:
On the General page of Settings, click the Delete account button:
If you are a team owner, you will be asked to first remove yourself from all teams that you belong to:
Note
If you are the only member of a team, you will have to delete the team before you can delete your account. In order to do that, please email support@observablehq.com.
After that, or if you are an individual account owner, you see the following modal:
Your account will then be scheduled for deletion. If you have specified your email address, you will receive an email confirmation of the deletion request.
Account settings
General
This is where you configure your account, profile, and preferences.
- Account
- Set or change your username (which appears in the URLs of the your profile and notebooks).
- Change your tier (for example, from the Free tier to the Pro tier).
- Set or change the email address to receive notifications and messaging about the account.
- Delete your account if desired.
- Personal profile
- Customize your avatar and banner.
- Set your display name and pronouns.
- Write a brief biography.
- Specify any Web sites that you wish to have associated with your profile.
- Specify a publicly-visible email address.
- Editor Preferences
- Enable or disable the automatic insertion of closing parentheses and brackets.
- Enable or disable the use of Prettier to format code in all team notebooks.
- Enable or disable spell checking in Markdown cells and comments (where supported by browser).
- Enable or disable keyboard shortcuts to make it easier to create new JavaScript cells.
- Misc preferences
- Show or hide the Quick guides on your home page.
Moderation
Enables you to block users or teams from sending invitations to join their team. When you receive an invitation to join a team, a link appears at the bottom of the invitation, enabling you to block the user or the team sending the invitation:
Clicking either link will ask you to confirm:
Once you have blocked a user or workspace, it will show up under the Moderation heading:
API Keys
Use API keys to securely load and embed private notebooks outside of Observable.
OAuth Tokens
OAuth tokens are used to allow notebooks to access data in cloud files. After you have signed in to the cloud service provider for a given cloud file, an OAuth token is stored in your Settings so that you will not have to sign in each time you want to visit a notebook that requires them. See Cloud Files for more information.