mcp-obsidian

MCP server for Obsidian

MCP server to interact with Obsidian via the Local REST API community plugin.

Components

Tools

The server implements multiple tools to interact with Obsidian:

• list_files_in_vault: Lists all files and directories in the root directory of your Obsidian vault
• list_files_in_dir: Lists all files and directories in a specific Obsidian directory
• get_file_contents: Return the content of a single file in your vault.
• search: Search for documents matching a specified text query across all files in the vault
• patch_content: Insert content into an existing note relative to a heading, block reference, or frontmatter field.
• append_content: Append content to a new or existing file in the vault.
• delete_file: Delete a file or directory from your vault.

Example prompts

Its good to first instruct Claude to use Obsidian. Then it will always call the tool.

The use prompts like this:

• Get the contents of the last architecture call note and summarize them
• Search for all files where Azure CosmosDb is mentioned and quickly explain to me the context in which it is mentioned
• Summarize the last meeting notes and put them into a new note 'summary meeting.md'. Add an introduction so that I can send it via email.

Requirements

• Python >= 3.11
• mcp Python SDK >=1.1.0,<2.0.0 (pinned in pyproject.toml). mcp-obsidian currently registers its tool handlers via the mcp 1.x low-level Server API (@app.list_tools() / @app.call_tool()), which was removed in mcp 2.0. Installing with an unconstrained mcp>=2.0 will crash at import with AttributeError: 'Server' object has no attribute 'list_tools'.

Configuration

Obsidian REST API Key

There are two ways to configure the environment with the Obsidian REST API Key.

1. Add to server config (preferred)

{
  "mcp-obsidian": {
    "command": "uvx",
    "args": [
      "mcp-obsidian"
    ],
    "env": {
      "OBSIDIAN_API_KEY": "<your_api_key_here>",
      "OBSIDIAN_HOST": "<your_obsidian_host>",
      "OBSIDIAN_PORT": "<your_obsidian_port>"
    }
  }
}

Sometimes Claude has issues detecting the location of uv / uvx. You can use which uvx to find and paste the full path in above config in such cases.

2. Create a .env file in the working directory with the following required variables:

OBSIDIAN_API_KEY=your_api_key_here
OBSIDIAN_HOST=your_obsidian_host
OBSIDIAN_PORT=your_obsidian_port

Note:

• You can find the API key in the Obsidian plugin config
• Default port is 27124 if not specified
• Default host is 127.0.0.1 if not specified

Quickstart

Install

Obsidian REST API

You need the Obsidian REST API community plugin running: https://github.com/coddingtonbear/obsidian-local-rest-api

Install and enable it in the settings and copy the api key.

Claude Desktop

On MacOS: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

On Windows: %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mcp-obsidian": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": [
        "--directory",
        "<dir_to>/mcp-obsidian",
        "run",
        "mcp-obsidian"
      ],
      "env": {
        "OBSIDIAN_API_KEY": "<your_api_key_here>",
        "OBSIDIAN_HOST": "<your_obsidian_host>",
        "OBSIDIAN_PORT": "<your_obsidian_port>"
      }
    }
  }
}

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mcp-obsidian": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "mcp-obsidian"
      ],
      "env": {
        "OBSIDIAN_API_KEY": "<YOUR_OBSIDIAN_API_KEY>",
        "OBSIDIAN_HOST": "<your_obsidian_host>",
        "OBSIDIAN_PORT": "<your_obsidian_port>"
      }
    }
  }
}

Docker

You can run the server in a container instead of installing uv/Python locally.

1. Copy .env.example to .env and fill in your Obsidian REST API key:

cp .env.example .env

By default OBSIDIAN_HOST is set to host.docker.internal, which resolves to your host machine from inside the container (works on Linux, Mac and Windows).

2. Build the image:

docker compose build

3. Point your MCP client at the container. Since MCP speaks JSON-RPC over stdio, the client must run it with stdin attached and no pseudo-TTY — use docker compose run --rm -T, not docker compose up:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mcp-obsidian": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "compose",
        "-f",
        "<dir_to>/mcp-obsidian/docker-compose.yml",
        "run",
        "--rm",
        "-T",
        "mcp-obsidian"
      ]
    }
  }
}

You can also run it manually to sanity-check the container starts:

docker compose run --rm -T mcp-obsidian

(it will sit waiting for a JSON-RPC message on stdin; Ctrl+C to exit)

Development

Building

To prepare the package for distribution:

1. Sync dependencies and update lockfile:

uv sync

Debugging

Since MCP servers run over stdio, debugging can be challenging. For the best debugging experience, we strongly recommend using the MCP Inspector.

You can launch the MCP Inspector via npm with this command:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uv --directory /path/to/mcp-obsidian run mcp-obsidian

Upon launching, the Inspector will display a URL that you can access in your browser to begin debugging.

You can also watch the server logs with this command:

tail -n 20 -f ~/Library/Logs/Claude/mcp-server-mcp-obsidian.log