Obsidian and Claude

Integrating with an MCP server

You can use Obsidian as a graph based knolwdge base to add context and tools to Claude desktop.

The basic instructions are:

1. In Obsidian, go to settings > Community Plugs, search for Local REST API and install
2. Go to the plugin's settings page and get the API key, host and port
3. Go to the Obsidian MCP Server github repo, find "Published Servers Configuration" to get a config template for Claude Desktop
4. Fill this template out with your API Key, host and port
5. Go to Claude > Settings > Develper > Edit Config and add this edited template to the json
6. Restart Claude and verify no errors (if so... good luck!)

References

• A great YouTube video Obsidian MCP Setup Tutorial for Claude Desktop
• Obsidian MCP Server PyPi module: Obsiduan Server PyPi module
• Source for the Obsidian MCP Server: Obsidan MCP Sever GitHub
• Obsidian Local Rest API: Local Obsidian Rest API, Github

Usage Experience:

The primary issue I found when using this, is Claudes awareness of whent to call the tools. Since it has no knowledge of the content, it does not really have the context to decide when to use them. After a few promopts I told it to use Obsidian in its search and it worked. The conversation after that went reasonably well. The semantic search was not a great as I hoped... it missed knoweldge it should have found.