bitbonsai/mcpvault

What it solves

MCPVault allows AI assistants to interact directly with a local Obsidian vault. It bridges the gap between an AI client and a user's personal knowledge base, enabling the AI to read, search, and edit notes without requiring the Obsidian application to be running or any specific Obsidian plugins to be installed.

How it works

It operates as a local Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. When an AI client (like Claude Desktop or Cursor) starts the server as a stdio process, MCPVault provides a set of tools that the AI can call to perform file system operations. It interacts directly with the vault's markdown files and uses AST-aware updates to ensure that when frontmatter is edited, the formatting of other unchanged fields is preserved.

Who it’s for

Users of Obsidian who want to integrate their personal notes and knowledge base with AI agents and LLM clients for tasks like summarizing research, managing tags, or drafting new content based on existing notes.

Highlights

• Comprehensive Toolset: Provides 18 tools for operations including reading, writing, patching, deleting, and moving notes, as well as managing tags and frontmatter.
• Advanced Search: Features multi-word matching and BM25 reranking for more relevant search results.
• Security Focused: Implements strict path checks to block directory traversal, symlink escapes, and access to sensitive folders like .obsidian or .git.
• Flexible Write Modes: Supports overwrite, append, and prepend modes for adding content to notes.
• Broad Compatibility: Works with any MCP-compatible client, including Claude Desktop, ChatGPT Desktop (Enterprise+), Cursor, and Windsurf.