Chat with your second brain — search, read and write vault notes through the Local REST API.
An Obsidian vault is years of thinking in markdown — and precisely because it's local plain files, no cloud AI can see it. The Obsidian MCP server bridges that gap on your terms: it talks to the community Local REST API plugin running inside your Obsidian, so your assistant can search, read, create and modify notes while everything stays on your machine.
The retrieval experience is the revelation. Vault search finds strings; an assistant with vault access finds ideas — "what have I written about spaced repetition, and did my opinion change?" gets synthesized from the four notes where you touched the topic, including the two you'd forgotten. Connections you didn't draw yourself surface for free, which is rather the promise of the tools-for-thought genre finally cashed out.
Writing workflows follow naturally: daily notes appended with captured thoughts, meeting transcripts distilled into permanent notes in your own format, messy fleeting notes reorganised, periodic reviews drafted from the week's activity. Since the server works through Obsidian itself, edits respect your vault exactly as if typed — no sync conflicts, no external mutation of files behind Obsidian's back.
Setup: install the Local REST API plugin, copy its API key, add the server via uvx. Two honest caveats. Obsidian must be running for the bridge to work — the REST API lives inside the app. And you're handing an assistant read/write over possibly your most personal corpus; the local-only architecture is exactly why this is tolerable, but keep vault backups regardless (you have git or sync on it anyway — right?).
Questions answered across every note that touches a topic — including the ones you forgot.
Thoughts appended to today's note without leaving the conversation.
Fleeting notes distilled, structures reorganised, weekly reviews drafted.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| obsidian_simple_search | Text search across the vault |
| obsidian_complex_search | Structured queries (e.g. by path pattern) |
| obsidian_get_file_contents | Read a note |
| obsidian_append_content | Append to a note (daily-note friendly) |
| obsidian_patch_content | Insert content relative to headings or blocks |
| obsidian_list_files_in_vault | Browse the vault structure |
| obsidian_get_periodic_note | Fetch today's daily (or other periodic) note |
{
"mcpServers": {
"obsidian": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": ["mcp-obsidian"],
"env": {
"OBSIDIAN_API_KEY": "key-from-local-rest-api-plugin",
"OBSIDIAN_HOST": "127.0.0.1"
}
}
}
}First install the 'Local REST API' community plugin in Obsidian and copy its API key.
Obsidian running with the Local REST API community plugin enabled. Python with uv for the server.
| Variable | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
| OBSIDIAN_API_KEY | API key shown by the Local REST API plugin settings | Yes |
| OBSIDIAN_HOST | Host where Obsidian's REST API listense.g. 127.0.0.1 | Optional |
A knowledge graph your assistant keeps between sessions — entities, relations and observations that persist.
Kill hallucinated APIs — version-accurate, up-to-date library documentation injected straight into context.
Your workspace, on speaking terms with AI — search, read and write Notion pages and databases.
A structured scratchpad for hard problems — stepwise reasoning with revisions, branches and visible logic.
Symbol-level code navigation, refactoring and memory for coding agents — the IDE brain your assistant has been missing.
Alibaba Cloud Ops MCP Server is a [Model Context Protocol (MCP)](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/introduction) server that provides seamless