Obsidian Brain runs on your own machine — the client starts it, so there is no endpoint to ping. 359 installs a week from npm. Last commit 16 May 2026.
Obsidian MCP server: semantic search, knowledge graph, and vault editing. No plugin required.
What the code does
We read the source, 3 d ago · rules 995398eba69f
What this server is able to do. For an MCP server this is often the job itself — a terminal server runs commands because that is what it is for. Listed so you know what you are plugging in, not as an accusation.
postinstall: npm rebuild better-sqlite3 || (echo 'obsidian-brain: postinstall rebuild of better-sqlite3 FAILED — your install may crash on first boot. Run `npm rebuild better-sqlite3` manually, or `rm -rf ~/.npm/_npx` and retry. See https://sweir1.github.io/obsidian-brain/troubleshooting/#err_dlopen_failed-node_module_version-mismatch' 1>&2; exit 1)
const child = spawn(cmd, args, {
const modelDir = path.join(cacheRoot, this._model);
Is this your server and something here is wrong? Tell us — corrections are free and do not require a plan.
This code can reach further than it looks
We found places where it runs commands, builds paths or queries from values it is given. None of that is a flaw by itself — it becomes one when the code changes, and code changes quietly between releases. We re-read it on every one.
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-brain -e 'VAULT_PATH=<VAULT_PATH>' -- npx -y obsidian-brain{
"mcpServers": {
"obsidian-brain": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"-y",
"obsidian-brain"
],
"env": {
"VAULT_PATH": "<VAULT_PATH>"
}
}
}
}[mcp_servers.obsidian-brain]
command = "npx"
args = ["-y", "obsidian-brain"]
env = { VAULT_PATH = "<VAULT_PATH>" }{
"mcpServers": {
"obsidian-brain": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"-y",
"obsidian-brain"
],
"env": {
"VAULT_PATH": "<VAULT_PATH>"
}
}
}
}{
"servers": {
"obsidian-brain": {
"type": "stdio",
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"-y",
"obsidian-brain"
],
"env": {
"VAULT_PATH": "<VAULT_PATH>"
}
}
}
}Put your own value in place of
<VAULT_PATH> (Absolute path to your Obsidian vault (or any folder of .md files)).
The author’s registry entry marks it as required.
Optional settings from the registry entry, left out of the block above:
DATA_DIR (Where to store the SQLite index + embedding cache. Defaults to $XDG_DATA_HOME/obsidian-brain or ~/.local/share/obsidian-brain), EMBEDDING_PRESET (Preset name: english (default, bge-small-en-v1.5), english-fast, english-quality, multilingual, multilingual-quality, multilingual-ollama. Ignored when EMBEDDING_MODEL is set), EMBEDDING_MODEL (Power-user override: any transformers.js checkpoint or Ollama model id. Takes precedence over EMBEDDING_PRESET. Switching auto-reindexes), EMBEDDING_PROVIDER (Embedding backend. 'transformers' (local, default) or 'ollama' (requires a running Ollama server)), OLLAMA_BASE_URL (Base URL of a local Ollama server. Only used when EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=ollama), OLLAMA_EMBEDDING_DIM (Override the embedding dimensionality when EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=ollama. If unset, the server probes the model on startup), OLLAMA_NUM_CTX (Override Ollama's num_ctx for embed requests. Leave UNSET to let obsidian-brain auto-detect via `/api/show`'s `context_length` (e.g. nomic-embed-text=2048, bge-m3=8192, qwen3-embedding:0.6b=32 768). Setting this manually imposes a hard cap and may silently truncate longer inputs — see https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/14259. Ollama's own default is 2048 which truncates for any model trained on a larger context. See also https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/7008. Fallback when both env is unset AND /api/show is unreachable: 8192), OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_OLLAMA_AUTO_PULL (Auto-pull the configured Ollama model when /api/show returns 404 (model not present). Default ON — choosing an Ollama-backed preset is implicit consent to download its model. Streams /api/pull progress to stderr. Set to '0' to disable auto-pull entirely (master kill-switch) and fall back to the actionable error path (`HTTP 404 — try: ollama pull <model>`)), OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_OLLAMA_BYOM_AUTO_PULL (Opt-in to auto-pull for BYOM (custom EMBEDDING_MODEL) Ollama models OUTSIDE Ollama's official `library/` namespace. Default OFF — third-party models (e.g. `user/custom-fork`, `myregistry.com/team/model`) require this env var to be set to `1` before they will auto-pull, to prevent silent downloads of arbitrary user-named artifacts. Preset-known models (via EMBEDDING_PRESET) and bare model ids in the official library (e.g. `qwen3-embedding:0.6b`, `library/llama3:8b`) continue to auto-pull by default per the existing OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_OLLAMA_AUTO_PULL behavior), OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_NO_WATCH (Set to '1' to disable the live chokidar file watcher. Useful on SMB/NFS vaults where FSEvents/inotify don't fire reliably — fall back to running `obsidian-brain index` on a schedule (launchd/systemd)), OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_NO_CATCHUP (Set to '1' to skip the startup catchup reindex pass that picks up edits made while the server was down. The live file watcher still starts (via OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_NO_WATCH=1 to disable that separately), and first-time indexing on an empty DB is unaffected — this knob only governs the post-restart `enqueueBackgroundReindex` walk), OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_WATCH_DEBOUNCE_MS (Per-file reindex debounce for the live watcher, in milliseconds), OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_COMMUNITY_DEBOUNCE_MS (Graph-wide community-detection (Louvain) debounce for the live watcher, in milliseconds. Louvain is the only expensive op — batching it prevents per-edit CPU spikes), OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_TOOL_TIMEOUT_MS (Per-tool-call timeout in milliseconds. Tools exceeding this return an MCP error instead of hanging), OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_MAX_CHUNK_TOKENS (Override the adaptive chunk-size budget (in tokens). When set, this beats the capacity probed from the model's tokenizer or Ollama /api/show. Use for debugging or for models with stale tokenizer configs), OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_CONFIG_DIR (Override the per-user config directory where obsidian-brain stores model overrides (`model-overrides.json`) and the user-fetched seed (`seed-models.json`). Default is `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/obsidian-brain` on macOS/Linux (or `~/.config/obsidian-brain`) and `%APPDATA%/obsidian-brain` on Windows. Both files survive `npm update obsidian-brain` because they live outside the package), OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_DEBUG (Set to "1" to print a verbose synchronous startup trace to stderr — every preflight, createContext, server.connect, and shutdown step is logged with a monotonic timestamp. The LAST line before any silent failure tells you exactly which step the server reached. No-op when unset (no overhead). Use to diagnose silent-crash failure modes), OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_LOG_FORMAT (Set to 'ndjson' for one-JSON-object-per-line stderr output (timestamp + level + message + structured fields). Default is human-readable plain text (`obsidian-brain: <message>`). Useful for piping logs into aggregators (Datadog, Loki, Vector, journald) that index structured fields).
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Obsidian Brain — questions
Answers built from our own checks of this server.