Obsidian Sync now has a headless client

6 hours ago (help.obsidian.md)

Also new: Obsidian joins the CLI gang

https://help.obsidian.md/cli

I’ve been having a lot of fun recently using AI CLIs with Obsidian. No plugins necessary because it’s just a directory tree of markdown files.

Oh! I worked on this project. If anyone has questions, I'll do my best to answer them!

  • Do you have a good starting point or explanation to share about using obsidian for a team, where we all change/sync files?

  • Wanted to say thanks. We were literally talking about the lack of a cli sync at work last week and I had moved to Syncthing because of that gap.

    Definitely will be looking at the official Obsidian sync plan now.

  • How are sync conflicts handled in the filesystem? Say I write to a file and another client's edit wins and mine is rejected.

    • The headless Obsidian Sync client works the same way as desktop and mobile clients, see:

      https://help.obsidian.md/sync/troubleshoot

      - Markdown files: Obsidian Sync merges the changes using Google's diff-match-patch algorithm.

      - Other file types: For all other files, including canvases, Obsidian uses a "last modified wins" approach. The most recently modified version replaces earlier versions.

      For conflicts in Obsidian settings, such as plugin settings, Obsidian Sync merges the JSON files. It applies keys from the local JSON on top of the remote JSON.

  • Are there plans to support scoped token permissions (specific folders or even specific notes)? I'd love to try setting up something that automatically updates a specific Obsidian note on a state change or cronjob, but I'd want to avoid giving access to the rest of the vault.

    also, thanks for the great product, bought the vip catalyst as a show of support.

    • Thanks for your support! Sync is end-to-end encrypted so the server doesn't know about specific paths in your vault. You would have to set those permissions at the filesystem level, or with the tool you're using.

    • Related tangent: "Relay" (https://relay.md") lets you sync / share files based on directory (vs. the whole vault). That enables things like "my private vault contains a subdir for work, and my work machine syncs to only that child subdir".

  • No question. Just wanted to drop by and say Obsidian is actually pretty cool. An absolute joy to use, and I only wish I learned about it earlier than I did.

  • I’m using a couchdb instance to sync a bunch of local obsidian installs and use an obsidian plugin to keep them synced- would this change that or make it easier?

  • It would be nice if one could sync dot files in the vault. For example, the .claude or .pi folder containing skills and whatnot.

Oh neat, I had come across the headless client yesterday (and submitted a now-fixed bug report for it after running into some issues).

Before opening HN this morning and seeing this post, I actually wrote a post about how I'm experimentally using headless to publish my blog: https://utf9k.net/blog/obsidian-headless/

Well, that post was my experiment but I'll be looking forward to trying it out going forward.

There are of course many alternatives and I'm sure this workflow may have its pains but for now, it feels like a lot less friction between actually writing and having it published.

I've used plain Git for many years of course but I've also tried other rube goldberg machines such as various Git-inside-Obsidian plugins and so on but there's always just a bunch of "stuff" between writing and putting it online.

I have probably searched "Obsidian CLI" once a month since I started playing around with AI over a year ago. This is pretty exciting.

I wish I could use Obsidian to edit single markdown files.

If my project has a readme.md I don't want to create an obsidian vault with its configuration files in my project, just to open it.

  • Yeah we'll add that at some point.

    It's a bit trickier than it seems because a lot of Obsidian configuration and app functionality is vault-specific. E.g. what theme should be used? What plugins should be available? Does autocomplete for [[links]] or properties do anything? Etc.

    • VSCode opens single files outside of projects. What do they do? Personally I wouldn’t mind if it just defaulted to the settings of the last-used vault.

      1 reply →

    • maybe you're overthinking it a little. You could make it of a default setup like the one you use for the sandbox, or some curated fast-loading one

Kinda related, does anyone have a favorite obsidian plugin for AI editing on mobile?

I wanna be able to talk to a document and iterate on it just like chatgpt with canvas but inside obsidian.

I've been digging around and haven't quite found anything to do that.

One potential challenge is I'm not sure how easy it would be to let it do tool calling to edit the document rather than spitting out the whole document each time (with risk of minor changes).

This was my most-wanted Obsidian feature, so I’m thrilled to see this. It’s going to be great for server-side automation and RAG against Obsidian vaults.

It would be good since I don't use obsidian on my desktop but I do on my phone, so that way I can use it for syncing and then open the documents on Neovim on my desktop

How’s their mobile all these days?

Along with sync that was the other blocker for me always.

  • Mobile app is pretty good, my biggest complaint is it won't sync in the background. It only syncs when you open it up. But it's well designed and fully functional.

Isn't there a script or a plugin to sync your vault to github, already? (may be even to sync several vaults, for example to share vaults between colleagues)

  • This tool should finally make it possible to setup a good web interface to my obsidian notes. I have a hacky setup using github as the backend storage system but its slow.

    Ive been surprised at how few people are interested in an obsidian browser tool, but its great if I want to read / write notes from a corporate laptop for example.

Why would you use this over plain git in a CI pipeline? Presumably you need your knowledge graph versioned?

  • iOS makes it painful to use third-party sync protocols and servers, like syncthing can't run in the background, a git sync service can't run in the background, only iCloud gets to run in the background.... and whatever sync protocol the app itself has blessed so it can run immediately on opening the app.

    As such, on iOS the native sync is the only one that works cleanly and seamlessly, and so you're incentivized to pay for it.

    There was a little while, when dropbox was big, where it seemed like the future of computing would be "your data is in the cloud, and every app you use can share that data, and those two things are independent integrated through some common filesystem layer".

    And then it ended up that no, your data's in a cloud-per-service, where your emails live in googles cloud, your documents in microsoft 365's cloud, your images in "adobe creative cloud"'s cloud, your photos in Apple's cloud, your passwords in 1Password's cloud, and your knowledgebase in Obsidian's cloud.

    The dream of the filesystem API being able to expand to clouds, of being able to choose dropbox or google or apple as the owner of your data, and other applications seamlessly integrating with any of them, it died with apple making it impossible to offer any sort of generic filesystem API or even background sync.

    And so, that's why you'd use obsidian sync over git, because you're cursed with using a phone.

    Unless you're saying "why not pay for obsidian sync, but then sync it into a git repo in CI and commit there to see the diffs", not "why not use git as the underlying sync protocol", in which case ignore everything I wrote, you totally could do that.

  • If you have automation that dumps things int your vault, that you built with their new CLI (which lets you create/tag docs etc. without running the full electron app), I guess this lets you sync those changes and propagate them to all of your obsidian sync clients also without having to open aforementioned full electron app.

  • Quoting[1] kepano (CEO of Obsidian) - Why you might use Obsidian Sync headless:

    - Automate remote backups

    - Automate publishing a website

    - Give agentic tools access to a vault without access to your full computer

    - Sync a shared team vault to a server that feeds other tools

    - Run scheduled automations e.g. aggregate daily notes into weekly summaries, auto-tag, etc

    ...all while having the speed, privacy, customizability, end-to-end encryption of Obsidian Sync.

    [1]: https://x.com/kepano/status/2027485552451432936

  • To enjoy the native ease of use and security of Obsidian Sync as a human user on your devices; while being able to automate things on a server.

  • Does the knowledge graph have a function other than to show off how big your vault is?

    • Only in 2nd-brain mythology, which holds that you'll discover connections between your notes that you didn't realize was there. I think it started as eye candy to confuse prospective users considering Roam Notes. They later did something similar with their "Canvas" feature. So, these are features you get with their lack of coherent vision, rather than basic usability and a safe plugin ecosystem, neither of which Obsidian plans to deliver..

Ha! Just yesterday I set up a git repo to sync my Obsidian vault with my Ubuntu VPS for LLM use. Part of me wishes this had come out one day sooner, though honestly, I've grown to like the git workflow. The deal-breaker is mobile: it just doesn't play nicely there, so I'll keep using native sync for that.

I just have my vault sitting in Dropbox ... Not sure what I would gain by moving to Sync?

  • End-to-end encryption, integrated version history, better mobile support, granular control over which settings and files are synced to each device.

    And generally help the continued development of Obsidian so we can stay 100% user-supported.

    https://stephango.com/vcware

    • Have you guys thought about extending version history beyond a year, or at least allowing users to export it so that it's not permanently lost? I'd subscribe to Obsidian Sync for the rest of my life if it wasn't for this one missing feature.

  • Access on mobile would be main reason. Perhaps that’s an iOS limitation, and Dropbox on Android is just a perfect replacement.

For some reason obsidian sync consitently empties random recently opened notes for me. I think it might be some kind of race condition between icloud sync and obsidian sync. File gets touched before obsidian gets to it so the empty note is seen as a new file. That theory doesn't quite hold up though because the same thing happens to me using the android client. Has anyone here had this problem?

  • I had this happen a bunch when I was using iCloud sync on multiple devices. I think it was mostly solved by setting the directory to “keep downloaded” (right click on it in finder and it’s the second option).

    That said, I’ve switched one vault to git and have had no issues there.

This is great, but as convenient as Obsidian Sync is, it'll never replace plain Git (for me) until it has unlimited version history:

> The retention period for your version history depends on your Obsidian Sync plan. On the Standard plan, notes are retained for 1 month, while on the Plus plan, they are kept for 12 months. After this period, older versions of your notes are deleted.

Finally! I had to set up a container with X on my headless server to get a few text files reliably synced, crazy stuff.

Nice to see an official headless option. If anyone is looking to do headless syncing specifically to their own Synology NAS, I created an open-source alternative for that here: https://pypi.org/project/obsidian-synology-sync/

  • I know this is headless but is there any other reason I should use this over the official Synology drive app?

    • The official Sync is focused on providing a more integrated experience in the Obsidian app

      - Built-in version history

      - Cross-platform support, especially on mobile

      - Fine-grained control (e.g. different theme/plugins/settings per device)

      - Sharing your vaults with other users

    • I've been using Synology Drive to sync Obsidian between different machines and my android phone and it works great. I've never seen a need to use the official sync.

    • Synology Drive is a file and folder syncing system.

      Obsidian is a note and wiki syncing system.

      You should use an obsidian syncing system if you want to sync notes and wikis. You should use a file syncing system if you want to sync files.

      1 reply →

Nice! I rely on Obsidian a lot for syncing knowledge while working with Claude agents, such as storing research and daily logs to catch up on the prior day’s work. It already works quite well with a custom skill that I build, but this may make the workflow smoother.

I also built a cli tool to index embeddings in LanceDB and do semantic search. It helps agents create better internal links between notes. https://github.com/ravila4/obsidian-semantic-search

What’s the best way to sync Obsidian without upgrading to their paid tier?

Interesting...I've been thinking for a while that doing instructions and logs through my obsidian notes would be really helpful and a great way to do more agentic work. I've paid for obsidian sync as a way to support their team for the last 3 years, but color me impressed that there are some more tangible benefits to it!

This is huge. I built SidianSidekicks and it is based on git because we don't want to lose your notes and thoughts, but convenience of Obsidan Sync are something that makes everything easy. I get this is in beta, and we will stick to git, but love what they are doing and looking forward to it.

Essentially Sync while you can emulate it on desktop, for mobile it is not good experience without Sync. And we want to have and record our thoughts with us all the time.

Now make Dropbox sync work with iPhone

  • That will never happen; their only money-making method is to limit the iOS app to sell their cloud. Otherwise, the desktop is already free with your own vault folder.

    They are trying their hardest to prevent users from using Google Drive or other services natively. While it is just a small option to add, it will make everyone drop their $4 cloud subscription.

    • If that were true Obsidian would not allow third-party sync plugins in the official directory, and wouldn't mention third-party options in the official docs:

      https://help.obsidian.md/sync-notes

      The goal for Obsidian Sync is to be the best option, not the only option.