Obsidian MCP

If your second brain lives in Obsidian, this connector lets Claude work with it. Ask it to pull together everything you've written on a topic, add today's meeting notes under the right heading or tidy the tags across a folder, and it does it in your actual vault.

It works through the free Local REST API community plugin, so Obsidian needs to be open with that plugin switched on. Copy the API key from the plugin's settings into the install command. It needs Node.js.

There are sensible safety switches: OBSIDIAN_READ_ONLY=true blocks every edit, and you can limit Claude to certain folders. Deletes happen without a prompt unless you turn confirmations on, so use read-only mode until you trust it. MarkusPfundstein's mcp-obsidian is the older, more-starred alternative, but it has fewer tools and no read-only mode.

• Search your vault by text, tags or frontmatter
• Read whole notes, a single section or today's daily note
• Create notes and edit one heading or block without touching the rest
• Manage tags and frontmatter across notes
• Find and replace inside a note

Open your terminal in the project folder and run:

claude mcp add obsidian -e OBSIDIAN_API_KEY=YOUR_API_KEY -e OBSIDIAN_BASE_URL=https://127.0.0.1:27124 -- npx -y obsidian-mcp-server@latest

Or add this to your project's .mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "obsidian": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "obsidian-mcp-server@latest"],
      "env": {
        "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE": "stdio",
        "OBSIDIAN_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY",
        "OBSIDIAN_BASE_URL": "https://127.0.0.1:27124"
      }
    }
  }
}

You'll be asked to sign in or paste an API key the first time you use it.

Obsidian users who want Claude to think with their notes.

• Searching your notes
• Writing up meeting notes
• Daily journaling
• Organising a knowledge base