Quoting[1] kepano (CEO of Obsidian) - Why you might use Obsidian Sync headless:

- Automate remote backups

- Automate publishing a website

- Give agentic tools access to a vault without access to your full computer

- Sync a shared team vault to a server that feeds other tools

- Run scheduled automations e.g. aggregate daily notes into weekly summaries, auto-tag, etc

...all while having the speed, privacy, customizability, end-to-end encryption of Obsidian Sync.

[1]: https://x.com/kepano/status/2027485552451432936

I just use Dropbox with dropsync on my phone. I never use the knowledge graph anyway

If you have automation that dumps things int your vault, that you built with their new CLI (which lets you create/tag docs etc. without running the full electron app), I guess this lets you sync those changes and propagate them to all of your obsidian sync clients also without having to open aforementioned full electron app.

Sorry, the lack of vision I referred to related to Obsidian's leadership -- unserious D&D kids largely unconcerned with usability, performing security theatrics with sync e2ee while their users data is regularly at risk of mass exfiltration via their insanely dangerous community plugin ecosystem.

The on-screen appearance of the feature you're referring to may be visual and coherent, I'm just pointing out that users frequently cite theoretical or anticipated benefits of this feature, not real ones.

To enjoy the native ease of use and security of Obsidian Sync as a human user on your devices; while being able to automate things on a server.

Gotcha, thanks. I just use git but don’t sync to my iPhone, this helps give context on the value prop there.

Or a dedicated app like GitSync

Which gates "sync" behind an expensive "premium" paywall.

It feels criminal to charge that much for the sync feature when it also can't possibly work, iOS actively does not want apps to run in the background, and does not offer a viable method for this libgit wrapper to execute libgit on, for example, a filesystem inotify event or write or whatever.

https://github.com/ViscousPot/GitSync/issues/807#issuecommen...

What do you know, people are observing it doesn't really work.

Apple's iOS has a pluggable Files system.

Okay, excellent, maybe you can tell me how to do this.

I have opened the builtin iOS notes app. It by default can sync notes with iCloud. I would like to have it store my notes in Git or Dropbox or anything else, and be able to also edit them on another machine and have the changes sync.

I won't hold my breath on how to do this because like clearly things are not pluggable, the builtin iOS apps don't work with anything but iCloud and the filesystem is obviously not pluggable or generic.

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

This reply does not address parents question at all.

A key feature of Obsidian is that it stores your notes in an open folder structure on your file system.

A very valid question is whether there are benefits to using a special note sync application rather than a standard file system sync application, and if so, what those benefits are.

The official Sync is focused on providing a more integrated experience in the Obsidian app

- Built-in version history

- Cross-platform support, especially on mobile

- Fine-grained control (e.g. different theme/plugins/settings per device)

- Sharing your vaults with other users

I've been using Synology Drive to sync Obsidian between different machines and my android phone and it works great. I've never seen a need to use the official sync.

Same

I'm talking more about the plugin architecture not about the file format or third-party applications. sync plugins seems to be pretty limited compared to what's offered for a subscription.

Seems fair to me.

Obsidian Sync has always been presented as a paid add-on, here to provide income for the company building Obsidian and giving it for free.

If they provided a direct BYOS(ync/erver) mechanism, less people would pay for the add-on, which is their source of income.

Instead, they let you use your own sync mechanism by only relying on text files.

I understand why some people could get upset about this, but they've always been transparent :

- no proprietary format ; can migrate at anytime without effort

- free but closed-sourced software

- add-ons for income

Joplin has great sync support for a number of providers, Dropbox, Onedrive, Nextcloud, S3 etc, Obsidian supports none of these on iOS so I cant sync all my devices without having all my notes go to Obsidian servers and paying the fee.

Obsidian's paid sync works great for me.

Mirrors my experience.

What tool can be used to resolve syncthing conflicts? I get a lot of.stversion files.

I try to selfhost most of my stuff I rely on. Immich, Vaultwarden, etc. I gave up on trying to selfhost sync solutions for Obsidian - Obsidian Sync is just so damn frictionless compared to all other solutions. Also, it feels good supporting the development of Obsidian.

I use this and a self-hosted couchdb. So far it seems to be good, but I haven't spent more than a few hours with it yet. I do have what appears to be a working setup on ios, macos, and linux. Obsidian's large number of plugins and control surfaces is a bit hazardous.

I did run with this setup for a few months (I believe like, 5 months already?) and when it works, it's nice, but 90% of the time it has been extremely painful.

Something breaks, one automatically updates and then it breaks the entire database, SCRAM mode, recovering is painful, and all the time I get warnings, spam and logs, it's anything but seamless.

Which is a real pity, because when it works it feels magical to use within my laptop, my phone and my tablet, all self hosted, but the pain won and so I'm searching for new alternatives.

Another option is obsidian lets you set which folders should sync. So I have everything in one vault, and in my trusted environment I let have everything synced, work machine only gets the work folder, and windows gaming machine only gets required non-confidential stuff (i.e notes about stuff that isnt me).

Its nice to be able to review it all from one machine though

I use both and I prefer their builtin sync, since I also code on Linux.

I built a one-time purchase solution that might help you.

- https://isolated.tech/apps/syncmd

- https://isolated.tech/apps/syncmd/blog/obsidian-git-ios-setu...

You can git clone directly to your iOS file system which fixes the Obsidian git plugin issue so you can use the Obsidian git plugin on your computer and mobile devices.

I use syncthing on mobile with no problems. Depending on your settings it might not work on low battery though.

Why not? I've used it between my desktops and my phone with no problem for years.

github private repo works fine

I'm doing the same since this is the only method I found I can let my bot access the files, something I couldn't achieve with Obsidian Sync.. until now!

How is remotely save obsidian plugin mentioned only once here? I set it up with a OneDrive I was already using anyway to host and sync my vault there. I have it set up and synced on 4 devices with 4 different os (win11, macos, ios, android) and it works great and is free.

Definitely one of the biggest ROI is to pay for the sync. I regret all years I tried git-based alternatives (it's still useful to have it in git for backup, but not as the main syncing mechanism).

I used iCloud in the past, but found that syncing between a few devices sometimes left my notes in a weird state - sometimes overwritten, missing, etc. I switched some time ago to https://github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save with backblaze and I periodically sync to a git repo for a second backup. No issues since then.

protip: You can make synctrain sync with an iOS shortcut, with the shortcut being triggered when Obsidian is opened or closed. This means you're always in sync, even if iOS hasn't allowed synctrain to run in the background.

Resilio.

Im just running a Nextcloud on a raspberry pi to sync everything. Works flawlessly for multiple years now.

I just pay for the sync. It probably helps I jumped on board when they still had early bird pricing for the sync

I’ve just about got this working on ios using the a-shell app as a terminal to run the git commands, with shortcuts set to run them when Obsidian opens and closes.

If you mostly use single-vault Obsidian in two devices, SyncThing is perfect imo.

Same. I lost data this way. It wasn't worth it. Happy to support Obsidian

I've had no trouble with syncthing on Android. It just has access to the sync folders, as far as I can tell. Seems to work great, even if I've got the same file open simultaneously on several devices. I use a tablet in my kitchen to show my TODO at all times.

I've been using Obsidian since the beginning, and it's the best money I can spend annually. It works perfectly, and I've never had any problems.

Syncthing has worked flawlessly for me.

I first used the Obsidian git-sync plugin. That worked fine, but but when I couldn't get it operable with my phone I caved and paid for sync.

Paying for sync is my way of supporting the developers of this excellent application. The sync works well, it's less hassle, and more secure than using the usual cloud services, particularly for iOS and Android. Obsidian and Tailscale are the two pieces of software I gladly pay for, I don't ever want them enshittified!

I use git on my own forgejo instance.

On MacOS, this is actually solved with the following native clis: pbcopy, pbpaste, trash.

A good example of this that I've noticed is a lot of newer devs were using GitHub Desktop or VS Code to manage git operations, but Claude gave them peek under the hood and now they're using it directly a bit more. Claude Code is a great gateway drug to CLI and TUI addiction

What is obsidian beyond a pile of markdown files without the app?

ripgrep?

Not gp, but because the way hackernews would render in a web browser versus curl is dramatically different, of course. There's a clear separation of presentation and content, and curl shows you presentation.

Notes being plain text files means that what you get by showing via a CLI is essentially the same as just `cat whatever-it-is.md`. Viewing a note via the CLI interface could have its merits (it could apply its own flavor of presentation), but come on now. Your example doesn't hold.

Thank you, that helped

I've used it with Claude Code for refactoring and helping write a really in depth D&D campaign. Using frontmatter, I can keep metadata about NPCs and characters synced across all files.

Fixes all the problems I've had about "In what order do I put this data" and flipping back and forth in a huge stack of papers.

Oh snap! Thanks for that, I can really make good use of this!

The Obsidian CLI enables many scenarios not possible with the Markdown files alone: building and debugging plugins, running commands, controlling Obsidian, querying bases, accessing the Obsidian index, ...

Look at the video, it explicitly starts with dealing with tasks in Markdown files. Unintuitively if I might say so, but it does.

I agree that now that this is a possibility, some sort of a wrapper would be great to see.

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.

We can't do much. He is the CEO of Obsidian, and he won't respond either. I guess it is time to build an alternative with these functions in place.

There's isn't an official one yet, but there are community options, or you could make your own. If you're wondering why this or that feature hasn't been added to Obsidian, remember we only have three full-time developers (and not trying to grow the team).

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

I had this happen a bunch when I was using iCloud sync on multiple devices. I think it was mostly solved by setting the directory to “keep downloaded” (right click on it in finder and it’s the second option).

That said, I’ve switched one vault to git and have had no issues there.

But one (git) doesn't suffice, it's way more limited for real-time sync when phones are involved

I assume they meant "it will never replace Git for syncing Obsidian".

I have sync to support the amazing devs, and for convenience, and an automatic git-based backup that runs in the background. It's good to double dip sometimes

what does this mean ? can i self host stuff ?

No questions, just thanks for helping with a great product.

I'm not sure how to make it work but like others in this thread I have an interest in sharing some - but not all - of my notes with some AI agents. Would love a solution that is built in to Obsidian / Obsidian Sync.

Related tangent: "Relay" (https://relay.md") lets you sync / share files based on directory (vs. the whole vault). That enables things like "my private vault contains a subdir for work, and my work machine syncs to only that child subdir".

No question. Just wanted to drop by and say Obsidian is actually pretty cool. An absolute joy to use, and I only wish I learned about it earlier than I did.

Yes, we're looking into that!

The headless Obsidian Sync client works the same way as desktop and mobile clients, see:

https://help.obsidian.md/sync/troubleshoot

- Markdown files: Obsidian Sync merges the changes using Google's diff-match-patch algorithm.

- Other file types: For all other files, including canvases, Obsidian uses a "last modified wins" approach. The most recently modified version replaces earlier versions.

For conflicts in Obsidian settings, such as plugin settings, Obsidian Sync merges the JSON files. It applies keys from the local JSON on top of the remote JSON.

Wanted to say thanks. We were literally talking about the lack of a cli sync at work last week and I had moved to Syncthing because of that gap.

Definitely will be looking at the official Obsidian sync plan now.

I’m using a couchdb instance to sync a bunch of local obsidian installs and use an obsidian plugin to keep them synced- would this change that or make it easier?

Depends on the size of the team and your requirements. The Obsidian team uses a shared Sync vault, which works well for us:

https://help.obsidian.md/teams/sync

If your team is more technical Git is an option. If you want completely control over permissions and configuration then a shared drive is probably better.

https://help.obsidian.md/teams/deploy

Obsidian Headless and Obsidian CLI are two separate things. CLI requires running the full app, and lets you do anything Obsidian can do. Headless doesn't require the app but for now it is just a Sync client.

https://help.obsidian.md/headless

https://help.obsidian.md/cli

Is there or do you plan to add some kind of webhook to notify interested parties that a vault has changed? I think it would go together nicely with the headless sync.

https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-skills

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!

If you don't have a window open, then VSCode opens with no active workspace. There are no workspace settings at all, and there is no file tree. But since VSCode has user level settings, these are what is used, including theming/etc.

If you have a window open, the file is opened to the workspace for that window. You can see this in action because the "Trust" dialog specifically says that you're trying to open untrusted files into a trusted workspace.

maybe you're overthinking it a little. You could make it of a default setup like the one you use for the sandbox, or some curated fast-loading one

i am not sure its that tricky, just have some user settings that are loaded when you open individual markdown files. show a different ui or hide some parts of the ui if need be!

Just put the default settings in the same place other apps put their settings. With an option for a custom path so I can sync it between my devices via syncthing.

Yeah I often find myself with this need too and I really didn't want to open a huge Electron app each time I need to visualize or edit a simple md file.

Claude helped me vibe code a small rust editor : https://github.com/Karalix/markzap it's tuned to my usage, you should make your own too !

Please.

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.

GitHub: https://dev.to/padiazg/how-to-sync-your-obsidian-vault-using...

If you’re on Apple devices only, then iCloud sync is free and works on all devices.

I no longer use Obsidian, so not sure what’s the best option for e.g. Linux <-> iOS sync except their service.

I'm quite fond of the obsidian-gut plugin and syncing to a private Forgejo instance.

For my work notes, which are not allowed to be stored outside company resources, I have set up a git repo and use a plugin that auto commits.

It does not work well for sharing to a mobile env but works great for desktop.

I use syncthing to sync my notes between my PC and Laptop. It works pretty well.

There is a self-hosted live sync plugin. It's rough around the edges but it mostly works and is actively maintained, if you are willing to self-host a sync server.

I say mostly works, because there are a lot of "gotchas" and the configuration and set up are a bit intimidating for the clients (the server is simple to host).

I used it for a while and it was fine, but I decided the cost of a coffee per month is worth not having to maintain it, and I switched to paying for their sync service.

However, there is also a git sync plugin that works really nicely. But it is not a real-time sync and it is not supported on mobile (officially). I mainly use that as a way to keep long running backups of my vaults in a self-hosted gitea instance (the default paid tier only keeps one month of history).

Not much, the main cost is having Claude write notes as we work, which isn't too different from what it does anyway with Plan mode, and it helps me onboard new sessions more easily. It also may save me some tokens because the tool I built helps it semantically search for relevant notes instead of wasting tool calls on grep and reading irrelevant documents.

For just text notes is very low token usage, i use Opus for everything and a whole week of notes is like 30m of a coding session

It's nothing too fancy - I use Obsidian as a memory layer for both agents and myself. I keep a daily programming journal, and ask agents to update it as we work. I often have to nudge it to use the skill, but sometimes it asks me if I want to note things down. The core of the skills is just templates that teach claude how I like my notes formatted, and how my vault is laid out.

I find that it is useful as a way to quickly catch up a new session by asking it to read what we did yesterday or earlier that day.

The semantic search layer allows it to search further back in time, or find connections across unrelated notes. I built it because it used to waste a lot of tool calls with grep commands whenever I asked it to find something.

I'm still iterating, but I put together a repo with some of the skills that I find most useful for organization: https://github.com/ravila4/claude-adhd-skills

Have you ever considered using a knowledge graph?

Finally! I had to set up a container with X on my headless server to get a few text files reliably synced, crazy stuff.

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.

This tool should finally make it possible to setup a good web interface to my obsidian notes. I have a hacky setup using github as the backend storage system but its slow.

Ive been surprised at how few people are interested in an obsidian browser tool, but its great if I want to read / write notes from a corporate laptop for example.

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...

Too late

Access on mobile would be main reason. Perhaps that’s an iOS limitation, and Dropbox on Android is just a perfect replacement.

Yes, I'd like to add that.

I did the same, but sync takes it to another level - the conflict resolution is far better, especially when you have it on both desktop and mobile, and for multiple users on a team you can work on the same doc at the same time without worrying or having to check if Dropbox is working. Add the version history and it's a no-brainer.

Not losing data when you edit your note on two devices

Great, now it can corrupt my data headlessly too.

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.

I've tried a bunch of them only to settle on using Claude Code with remote control.

That a nuisance as I spend a lot of time on the subway without service but not a total dealbreaker

Looking forward to it! Just wanted to say thanks for helping to build Obsidian. It's a great piece of software.

I use Obsidian with my Claude (and Codex) but not sure what additional value the CLI would provide since it's just markdown files. What am I missing that a CLI provides for AI? And not sure how the sync fits into it unless there's a copy of the vault that the AI is working with over CLI? Can use a tip.

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.

It still needs obsidian running... So not really head less

You know… I can’t think of the last time I was 2 places at once…

Obsidian is my favorite new tool. I started a new job last week and decided to spin it up on day one to help me onboard and learn their system. It’s been wildly successful, the missing piece I needed to really turn Claude Code into the learning and documentation tool I dreamed about.

Will this ever be able to work with a self hosted server?

On the other hand, I'll happily support the developers at Obsidian. It's a great product.

Thanks for the recommendation! Will get this set up for sure

I just built a headless sync client a few days ago. Happy that there's now an official solution!

Hey, developer behind Relay here.

Yes, our sync engine is home-grown. We use CRDTs to provide real-time google-docs-like collaboration which is not something Obsidian supports (yet... i think they are working on it).

Note that you can self-host a Relay server and join it to our network. This gives you complete control over your data and unmetered storage. We do still charge for seats if you have more than 3 collaborators.

I will double check this, I was pretty sure I've done this already (seemed obvious) but perhaps something weird happened with the binding

ahhhhhhhhhh I thought it was a hotkey difference, I thought I've gone through all the settings many times, but maybe not. Found it. thank you!

I just had Claude go through my Journal/ and mark 800 obsolete daily tasks as done so that they don't clutter my reports anymore.

Any kind of automation, really. Much easier than just raw editing the markdown in some cases.

This one is compatible (mostly) and doesnt require obsidian to run https://github.com/the-shift-dev/napkin

I did see that but it did not help me understand the specific use cases. Someone else did, though.

Thank you