Obsidian-Notes

The Obsidian Notes MCP Server provides a standardized MCP interface for AI agents to interact with a local Obsidian Vault. It exposes tools to recursively index notes and folders, and to read the full content of individual Markdown notes, enabling models to retrieve grounding context from your personal knowledge base while staying read-only and secure. Clients can connect using a compatible MCP client (e.g., LM Studio, Claude Desktop, or MCP Inspector) and issue commands through the MCP protocol to discover vault structure and fetch note content on demand.

To use the server, configure your MCP client with the server’s connection details and point it to the Python interpreter and server.py file as shown in the example configuration. Once running, you can request a recursive list of notes and folders (list_notes, list_folders) and retrieve specific note contents (read_note) by providing a relative path within the vault. The server enforces strict path validation to prevent traversal outside the vault, ensuring your data remains read-only and protected.

Prerequisites:

• Python 3.10 or higher
• An Obsidian Vault or a directory containing Markdown files
• Access to install Python dependencies (pip)

1. Clone the repository:

git clone <repository-url>
cd obsidian-notes-server

2. Create and activate a virtual environment (recommended):

python -m venv venv
# Windows
venv\Scripts\activate
# macOS/Linux
source venv/bin/activate

3. Install dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Configure the vault path:

• Edit the file server.py and set the VAULT_PATH variable to the absolute path of your Obsidian Vault:

# Specify the absolute path to your vault
VAULT_PATH = r"C:\Path\To\Your\Obsidian Vault"

5. Run the server to verify:

python server.py

6. In your MCP client, configure the server using the provided example configuration, pointing to your Python interpreter and the server entry point (server.py).

Tips and considerations:

• The server exposes read-only operations to protect your vault; it cannot modify or delete notes.
• Ensure VAULT_PATH is accessible by the user running the server and uses an absolute path.
• The list_notes and list_folders tools return newline-delimited relative paths, useful for quick indexing or building discovery prompts.
• The read_note tool returns the full Markdown content for grounding; be mindful of large notes when embedding in prompts.
• If you change the vault structure, restart the server to refresh available paths.
• For LM Studio or Claude Desktop integrations, follow the client documentation to map the mcpServers configuration to your environment.