Obsidian Semantic Search MCP Server

Connect this server

This server runs on your own machine — install it with the package manager and the client starts it for you. Package name taken from the official registry entry.

claude mcp add obsidian-semantic-mcp -e 'OBSIDIAN_VAULT_ROOT=<OBSIDIAN_VAULT_ROOT>' -- npx -y @dalecb/obsidian-semantic-mcp

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "obsidian-semantic-mcp": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "@dalecb/obsidian-semantic-mcp"
      ],
      "env": {
        "OBSIDIAN_VAULT_ROOT": "<OBSIDIAN_VAULT_ROOT>"
      }
    }
  }
}

[mcp_servers.obsidian-semantic-mcp]
command = "npx"
args = ["-y", "@dalecb/obsidian-semantic-mcp"]
env = { OBSIDIAN_VAULT_ROOT = "<OBSIDIAN_VAULT_ROOT>" }

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "obsidian-semantic-mcp": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "@dalecb/obsidian-semantic-mcp"
      ],
      "env": {
        "OBSIDIAN_VAULT_ROOT": "<OBSIDIAN_VAULT_ROOT>"
      }
    }
  }
}

{
  "servers": {
    "obsidian-semantic-mcp": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "@dalecb/obsidian-semantic-mcp"
      ],
      "env": {
        "OBSIDIAN_VAULT_ROOT": "<OBSIDIAN_VAULT_ROOT>"
      }
    }
  }
}

Put your own value in place of <OBSIDIAN_VAULT_ROOT> (Absolute path to the local Obsidian vault). The author’s registry entry marks it as required.

Optional settings from the registry entry, left out of the block above: OBSIDIAN_SEMANTIC_MCP_HOME (Directory for the external SQLite index, logs, and cache), OBSIDIAN_EMBED_MODEL (Ollama embedding model name. Defaults to bge-m3), OLLAMA_BASE_URL (Ollama API base URL. Defaults to http://localhost:11434), OBSIDIAN_SEMANTIC_STARTUP_INDEX (Set to true to run incremental indexing when the server starts), OBSIDIAN_SEMANTIC_ALLOW_SENSITIVE (Set to true to allow include_sensitive tool calls), OBSIDIAN_SEMANTIC_EXCLUDE (Comma- or newline-separated folders to always exclude from indexing, search, and read), OBSIDIAN_SEMANTIC_SENSITIVE_PATHS (Comma- or newline-separated folders treated as sensitive (blocked unless unlocked). Defaults to 08_PersonalInfo/).