by tokidoo
Enhance your workflow with Obsidian Advanced, the ultimate Obsidian plugin for note management, automation, and advanced
Integrates AI assistants with your Obsidian vault through the Local REST API plugin for advanced note management and analysis. Goes beyond basic operations to provide graph analysis, vault structure mapping, and batch operations.
Obsidian Advanced is a community-built MCP server published by tokidoo that provides AI assistants with tools and capabilities via the Model Context Protocol. Enhance your workflow with Obsidian Advanced, the ultimate Obsidian plugin for note management, automation, and advanced It is categorized under productivity.
You can install Obsidian Advanced in your AI client of choice. Use the install panel on this page to get one-click setup for Cursor, Claude Desktop, VS Code, and other MCP-compatible clients. This server runs locally on your machine via the stdio transport.
MIT
Obsidian Advanced is released under the MIT license. This is a permissive open-source license, meaning you can freely use, modify, and distribute the software.
Add new capabilities to Claude beyond text generation
Example
Access external data sources, execute code, interact with tools and services
Transform Claude from chatbot to action-taking agent
Provide Claude with access to relevant context and data
Example
Load project documentation, access knowledge bases, query databases
Get more accurate, context-aware responses
Automate multi-step workflows combining AI and external tools
Example
Research → Summarize → Create document → Send notification
Complete complex tasks end-to-end without manual steps
Share your MCP server with the developer community
Useful MCP listing: Obsidian Advanced is the kind of server we cite when onboarding engineers to host + tool permissions.
Obsidian Advanced is a well-scoped MCP server in the explainx.ai directory — install snippets and categories matched our Claude Code setup.
According to our notes, Obsidian Advanced benefits from clear Model Context Protocol framing — fewer ambiguous “AI plugin” claims.
We wired Obsidian Advanced into a staging workspace; the listing’s GitHub and npm pointers saved time versus hunting across READMEs.
We wired Obsidian Advanced into a staging workspace; the listing’s GitHub and npm pointers saved time versus hunting across READMEs.
According to our notes, Obsidian Advanced benefits from clear Model Context Protocol framing — fewer ambiguous “AI plugin” claims.
We evaluated Obsidian Advanced against two servers with overlapping tools; this profile had the clearer scope statement.
We wired Obsidian Advanced into a staging workspace; the listing’s GitHub and npm pointers saved time versus hunting across READMEs.
Strong directory entry: Obsidian Advanced surfaces stars and publisher context so we could sanity-check maintenance before adopting.
Obsidian Advanced reduced integration guesswork — categories and install configs on the listing matched the upstream repo.
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Advanced MCP server for interacting with Obsidian via the Local REST API community plugin. It empowers AI agents (like Claude) to deeply understand your vault's structure, links, and content—beyond basic read/write operations.
Key advanced features, powered by the obsidiantools library:
This setup lets AI agents work alongside you, boosting productivity by efficiently navigating and enhancing your knowledge base.
The server implements multiple tools to interact with Obsidian:
obsidian_list_files_in_dir: Lists all files and directories in a specific Obsidian directoryobsidian_batch_get_files: Return the contents and metadata of one or more notes (.md files) in your vaultobsidian_put_file: Create a new file in your vault or update the content of an existing oneobsidian_append_to_file: Append content to a new or existing file in the vaultobsidian_patch_file: Insert content into an existing note relative to a heading, block reference, or frontmatter fieldobsidian_delete_file: Delete a file or directory from your vaultobsidian_simple_search: Simple search for documents matching a specified text query across all files in the vaultobsidian_complex_search: Complex search for documents using a JsonLogic query with support for 'glob' and 'regexp' pattern matchingobsidian_get_active_note: Get the content and metadata of the currently active note in Obsidianobsidian_periodic_notes: Get current periodic note for the specified period (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly)obsidian_recent_periodic_notes: Get most recent periodic notes for the specified period typeobsidian_recent_changes: Get recently modified files in the vault
Dataview community plugin to function. Make sure to install the Dataview plugin in your vault.obsidian_understand_vault: Get a comprehensive understanding of the vault structure including directory tree and NetworkX graph of note connectionsobsidian_open_files: Open one or more files in the vault in a new leafobsidian_list_commands: List all available commands you can run in obsidian interfaceobsidian_execute_commands: Execute one or more commands in obsidian interfaceIts good to first instruct Claude (or any other MCP client) to use Obsidian. Then it will always call the tool. For instance,
The use prompts like this:
obsidian_get_active_note, read it, then edit the note.For this MCP server, there are 2 required environment variables that need to be configured:
OBSIDIAN_API_KEY: Obtain this by installing the Obsidian REST API plugin, and go into settings.OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH: The absolute path to your vault must be set in order for tools (e.g. obsidian_understand_vault) to function properly.Additionally, there are 3 optional environment variables that could be altered:
OBSIDIAN_HOST: Could be changed in the Obsidian REST API plugin settings. Defaults to 127.0.0.1 as per the plugin's default settings.OBSIDIAN_PORT: Could be changed in the Obsidian REST API plugin settings. Defaults to 27124 as per the plugin's default settings.INCLUDE_TOOLS: This variable controls which tools would be available for use.
obsidian_understand_vault and obsidian_simple_search tool, you would set INCLUDE_TOOLS="obsidian_understand_vault,obsidian_simple_search" in the .env or in the server config.There are two ways to configure the environment with the Obsidian REST API Key.
{
"mcp-obsidian-advanced": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": [
"mcp-obsidian-advanced"
],
"env": {
"OBSIDIAN_API_KEY": "%3Cyour_api_key_here%3E",
"OBSIDIAN_HOST": "<your_obsidian_host>",
"OBSIDIAN_PORT": "<your_obsidian_port>",
"OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH": "</path/to/your/vault>",
"INCLUDE_TOOLS": ""
}
}
}
Sometimes Claude has issues detecting the location of uv / uvx. You can use
which uvxto find and paste the full path in above config in such cases.
.env file in the working directory with the following variables (only OBSIDIAN_API_KEY and OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH are required):OBSIDIAN_API_KEY=your_api_key_here
OBSIDIAN_HOST=your_obsidian_host
OBSIDIAN_PORT=your_obsidian_port
OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH=/path/to/your/vault
INCLUDE_TOOLS=name_of_tool1,name_of_tool2,...
Note: You can find the API key, Host and Port in the Obsidian plugin config Default port is 27124 if not specified Default host is 127.0.0.1 if not specified
To install Advanced Obsidian MCP Server for Claude Desktop automatically via Smithery:
npx -y @smithery/cli install @ToKiDoO/mcp-obsidian-advanced --client claude
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.
On MacOS: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
On Windows: %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
Published Servers Configuration:
{
"mcpServers": {
"mcp-obsidian-advanced": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": [
"mcp-obsidian-advanced"
],
"env": {
"OBSIDIAN_API_KEY": "<your_api_key_here>",
"OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH": "/path/to/your/vault/"
}
}
}
}
Development/Unpublished Servers Configuration
{
"mcpServers": {
"mcp-obsidian": {
"command": "uv",
"args": [
"--directory",
"/dir/to/mcp-obsidian-advanced",
"run",
"mcp-obsidian"
],
"env": {
"OBSIDIAN_API_KEY": "<your_api_key_here>",
"OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH": "/path/to/your/vault/"
}
}
}
}
Additional documentation for the obsidiantools library and Obsidian REST API can be found in the docs directory.
obsidiantools_in_15_minutes_documentation.md is a ipynb file that demonstrates use cases for obsidiantools.obsidian_rest_api_documentation.yaml is a yaml file that demonstrates use cases for the Obsidian REST API.To prepare the package for distribution:
uv sync
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-advanced run mcp-obsidian-advanced
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-advanced.log
Prerequisites
Time Estimate
15-60 minutes depending on server complexity
Steps
Troubleshooting
✓ Do
✗ Don't
💡 Pro Tips
Architecture
Model Context Protocol standardizes how AI hosts (Claude, Cursor) communicate with external tools and data sources through server implementations.
Protocols
Compatibility
✓ Use when
Use when you need Claude to access external data, execute actions, or integrate with tools. Best for extending AI capabilities beyond conversation.
✗ Avoid when
Avoid when native integrations exist (use official APIs directly), for real-time critical systems, or when security/compliance requires zero external dependencies.