Obsidian Sync now has a headless client

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Oh wow thats good timing. I DIY’ed a workaround for this only last week for my openclaw instance. Happy to change it to this! https://jakobs.dev/granular-notes-access-limiting-openclaw-b...

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

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

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)

How’s their mobile all these days?

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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/

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

I love this as I can now sync the research I do using an OpenClaw running on an EC2 instance. My setup here: https://x.com/AdilMouja/status/2025266443613319546

YES...HA HA HA...YES!

Great, now it can corrupt my data headlessly too.

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!

YES! YES! YES! AHAHAH YES!

Too late

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.

what does this mean ? can i self host stuff ?

Fantastic! Now I don't need to run it in a headless xorg session.

Now make Dropbox sync work with iPhone

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I really love Obsidian and the direction they’re going with CLI. I think one of the most important things we can do while waiting for super intelligent assistants is capturing more of our thoughts and knowledge. Obsidian has been the tool I do that with.