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Vault Knowledge Base

by dgalichet
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This plugin has not been manually reviewed by Obsidian staff. Search the current vault through a local obsidian-kb semantic index.

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README file from

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Vault Knowledge Base

AI-ready lexical, semantic, and graph search for your Obsidian vault.

Vault Knowledge Base, or OKB, connects your Obsidian vault to LLM agents such as Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, or any MCP-compatible assistant.

It wraps the local obsidian-kb service inside Obsidian, giving you a side panel for search, related notes, and index maintenance, while exposing the same vault through MCP for agent workflows.

The companion obsidian-kb CLI indexes your markdown knowledge base locally with lexical search, semantic search, and graph-aware related-note discovery. Your agent can then retrieve, inspect, and connect notes without uploading your vault to a hosted knowledge service.

OKB is not a standalone search engine. It is an Obsidian UI and lifecycle wrapper around the separate obsidian-kb CLI, which must be installed on the same machine. On desktop, OKB starts obsidian-kb serve as a local external process and talks to it over localhost HTTP.

Why Vault Knowledge Base?

Obsidian is a strong foundation for a personal or team knowledge base: markdown files, local ownership, backlinks, graph navigation, and Git-friendly storage.

LLM agents need more than files. They need a reliable way to search the vault, follow relationships, inspect relevant notes, and keep context grounded in the actual knowledge base.

Vault Knowledge Base provides that bridge:

  • Inside Obsidian, it gives you search, related notes, and index controls.
  • Outside Obsidian, it exposes the vault to agents through MCP.
  • Locally, it keeps indexing and retrieval data on your machine.

The workflow is aligned with the LLM Wiki pattern described by Andrej Karpathy: a persistent, evolving markdown knowledge base maintained with the help of LLM agents, where Obsidian is the human-facing workspace and agents help with search, linking, summarization, and maintenance.

Use Cases

Use Vault Knowledge Base when you want to:

  • Search an Obsidian vault from Codex, Claude Code, or another LLM agent.
  • Add MCP access to a local markdown knowledge base.
  • Build a local RAG-style workflow without moving your vault to a hosted service.
  • Combine lexical search, semantic search, and graph-based related-note discovery.
  • Keep Obsidian as the editing interface while agents use obsidian-kb as the retrieval layer.

What It Does

  • Starts or connects to obsidian-kb serve.
  • Initializes .obsidian-kb.toml for the current vault from plugin settings.
  • Searches the current vault through POST /search.
  • Finds notes related to the active note through /mcp and the related tool.
  • Refreshes the local index with POST /index/refresh.
  • Opens result notes directly in Obsidian.
  • Stops only the obsidian-kb serve process started by the plugin. A service started manually in a terminal is left running.

Requirements

  • Obsidian Desktop. OKB does not support Obsidian Mobile.
  • The obsidian-kb CLI installed locally on the same computer.

The plugin is desktop-only because it uses Electron/Node.js process APIs to launch and manage obsidian-kb serve. Mobile Obsidian cannot spawn that local process, and the plugin release does not bundle the obsidian-kb executable.

Runtime Model

OKB has two parts at runtime:

  • The Obsidian plugin assets: manifest.json, main.js, and styles.css.
  • The external obsidian-kb binary, installed separately and launched as obsidian-kb serve.

When auto-start is enabled, OKB starts the service from inside Obsidian. If an obsidian-kb serve instance is already running, OKB can connect to it instead. On shutdown, OKB only stops the process it started itself; a service started manually in a terminal is left running.

Install obsidian-kb

On macOS with Homebrew:

brew install dgalichet/tap/obsidian-kb

Or download the matching archive from the latest obsidian-kb release and put the obsidian-kb binary on your PATH.

The plugin checks the usual macOS package-manager locations when launching the service, including /opt/homebrew/bin/obsidian-kb and /usr/local/bin/obsidian-kb. If your binary is elsewhere, set the obsidian-kb binary field in OKB settings to the absolute path returned by:

which obsidian-kb

Install the Plugin

For local development, build the plugin and copy or symlink this directory into:

<vault>/.obsidian/plugins/okb/

Then enable OKB from Obsidian's community plugins settings.

For manual release installation, copy these release assets into the same okb plugin folder:

  • manifest.json
  • main.js
  • styles.css

Install With BRAT

BRAT can install OKB directly from GitHub once a release has been published. It only installs the Obsidian plugin assets; you still need to install the obsidian-kb CLI separately.

  1. Install and enable Obsidian42 - BRAT from Obsidian's community plugins.

  2. Run BRAT: Add a beta plugin for testing from the command palette.

  3. Enter this repository URL:

    https://github.com/dgalichet/obsidian-kb-plugin

  4. Choose the latest version when BRAT asks which version to install.

  5. Enable Vault Knowledge Base from Obsidian's community plugins list.

First-Time Setup

  1. Open Settings -> Community plugins -> OKB.
  2. Confirm the obsidian-kb binary path, or leave it as obsidian-kb when the command is on PATH or installed with Homebrew.
  3. Leave Vault path empty to use the current desktop vault, or set an explicit path when needed.
  4. Optionally set a custom Configuration file path passed as --config.
  5. Optionally set a custom Index directory path passed to obsidian-kb init --index-dir.
  6. Click Initialize to run obsidian-kb init --vault <vault>.
  7. Optionally configure search tuning, PDF indexing, and excluded headings from the same settings tab, then click Apply config.
  8. Start the service from the same settings tab, or leave auto-start enabled.
  9. Open the OKB side panel and refresh or rebuild the index from the Index tab.

The default obsidian-kb config file is .obsidian-kb.toml, and the default sidecar index directory is <vault>/.obsidian-kb.

Locality And Security

OKB talks to a local HTTP service on 127.0.0.1 by default. The companion obsidian-kb CLI indexes local vault files and stores retrieval data locally. OKB does not call hosted LLM APIs, does not send vault content to a remote service, and does not replace Obsidian's files.

Development

npm install
npm run dev

For a production bundle:

npm run build

Releasing

The Obsidian plugin id is okb. For a GitHub release, attach:

  • manifest.json
  • main.js
  • styles.css

The release tag must match manifest.json's version exactly. For example, use 0.1.0, not v0.1.0, because Obsidian installs assets from the GitHub release tagged with the manifest version.

The release contains only the Obsidian plugin assets. Users must install obsidian-kb separately before OKB can start or connect to the local service.

Releases are published by GitHub Actions when pushing a version tag in the X.Y.Z format. The tag must point to a commit reachable from main, and the version must match package.json and manifest.json.

npm version patch
git push origin main --follow-tags

The release workflow builds the plugin and uploads the Obsidian release assets: main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css.

License

Licensed under either of:

  • Apache License, Version 2.0
  • MIT license

at your option.

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