Obsidian Brain MCP Setup & Guide

{
  "id": "io.github.sweir1/obsidian-brain",
  "type": "mcp-server",
  "version": "1.7.24",
  "displayName": "Obsidian Brain",
  "description": "Obsidian MCP server: semantic search, knowledge graph, and vault editing. No plugin required.",
  "repository": {
    "url": "https://github.com/sweir1/obsidian-brain",
    "source": "github"
  },
  "homepage": "https://sweir1.github.io/obsidian-brain/",
  "distribution": {
    "packages": [
      {
        "registryType": "npm",
        "identifier": "obsidian-brain",
        "version": "1.7.24",
        "runtimeHint": "npx",
        "transport": "stdio",
        "environmentVariables": [
          {
            "name": "VAULT_PATH",
            "description": "Absolute path to your Obsidian vault (or any folder of .md files).",
            "isRequired": true
          },
          {
            "name": "DATA_DIR",
            "description": "Where to store the SQLite index + embedding cache. Defaults to $XDG_DATA_HOME/obsidian-brain or ~/.local/share/obsidian-brain."
          },
          {
            "name": "EMBEDDING_PRESET",
            "description": "Preset name: english (default, bge-small-en-v1.5), english-fast, english-quality, multilingual, multilingual-quality, multilingual-ollama. Ignored when EMBEDDING_MODEL is set."
          },
          {
            "name": "EMBEDDING_MODEL",
            "description": "Power-user override: any transformers.js checkpoint or Ollama model id. Takes precedence over EMBEDDING_PRESET. Switching auto-reindexes."
          },
          {
            "name": "EMBEDDING_PROVIDER",
            "description": "Embedding backend. 'transformers' (local, default) or 'ollama' (requires a running Ollama server)."
          },
          {
            "name": "OLLAMA_BASE_URL",
            "description": "Base URL of a local Ollama server. Only used when EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=ollama."
          },
          {
            "name": "OLLAMA_EMBEDDING_DIM",
            "description": "Override the embedding dimensionality when EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=ollama. If unset, the server probes the model on startup."
          },
          {
            "name": "OLLAMA_NUM_CTX",
            "description": "Override Ollama's num_ctx for embed requests. Leave UNSET to let obsidian-brain auto-detect via `/api/show`'s `context_length` (e.g. nomic-embed-text=2048, bge-m3=8192, qwen3-embedding:0.6b=32 768). Setting this manually imposes a hard cap and may silently truncate longer inputs — see https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/14259. Ollama's own default is 2048 which truncates for any model trained on a larger context. See also https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/7008. Fallback when both env is unset AND /api/show is unreachable: 8192."
          },
          {
            "name": "OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_OLLAMA_AUTO_PULL",
            "description": "Auto-pull the configured Ollama model when /api/show returns 404 (model not present). Default ON — choosing an Ollama-backed preset is implicit consent to download its model. Streams /api/pull progress to stderr. Set to '0' to disable auto-pull entirely (master kill-switch) and fall back to the actionable error path (`HTTP 404 — try: ollama pull <model>`)."
          },
          {
            "name": "OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_OLLAMA_BYOM_AUTO_PULL",
            "description": "Opt-in to auto-pull for BYOM (custom EMBEDDING_MODEL) Ollama models OUTSIDE Ollama's official `library/` namespace. Default OFF — third-party models (e.g. `user/custom-fork`, `myregistry.com/team/model`) require this env var to be set to `1` before they will auto-pull, to prevent silent downloads of arbitrary user-named artifacts. Preset-known models (via EMBEDDING_PRESET) and bare model ids in the official library (e.g. `qwen3-embedding:0.6b`, `library/llama3:8b`) continue to auto-pull by default per the existing OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_OLLAMA_AUTO_PULL behavior."
          },
          {
            "name": "OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_NO_WATCH",
            "description": "Set to '1' to disable the live chokidar file watcher. Useful on SMB/NFS vaults where FSEvents/inotify don't fire reliably — fall back to running `obsidian-brain index` on a schedule (launchd/systemd)."
          },
          {
            "name": "OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_NO_CATCHUP",
            "description": "Set to '1' to skip the startup catchup reindex pass that picks up edits made while the server was down. The live file watcher still starts (via OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_NO_WATCH=1 to disable that separately), and first-time indexing on an empty DB is unaffected — this knob only governs the post-restart `enqueueBackgroundReindex` walk."
          },
          {
            "name": "OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_WATCH_DEBOUNCE_MS",
            "description": "Per-file reindex debounce for the live watcher, in milliseconds."
          },
          {
            "name": "OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_COMMUNITY_DEBOUNCE_MS",
            "description": "Graph-wide community-detection (Louvain) debounce for the live watcher, in milliseconds. Louvain is the only expensive op — batching it prevents per-edit CPU spikes."
          },
          {
            "name": "OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_TOOL_TIMEOUT_MS",
            "description": "Per-tool-call timeout in milliseconds. Tools exceeding this return an MCP error instead of hanging."
          },
          {
            "name": "OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_MAX_CHUNK_TOKENS",
            "description": "Override the adaptive chunk-size budget (in tokens). When set, this beats the capacity probed from the model's tokenizer or Ollama /api/show. Use for debugging or for models with stale tokenizer configs."
          },
          {
            "name": "OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_CONFIG_DIR",
            "description": "Override the per-user config directory where obsidian-brain stores model overrides (`model-overrides.json`) and the user-fetched seed (`seed-models.json`). Default is `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/obsidian-brain` on macOS/Linux (or `~/.config/obsidian-brain`) and `%APPDATA%/obsidian-brain` on Windows. Both files survive `npm update obsidian-brain` because they live outside the package."
          },
          {
            "name": "OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_DEBUG",
            "description": "Set to \"1\" to print a verbose synchronous startup trace to stderr — every preflight, createContext, server.connect, and shutdown step is logged with a monotonic timestamp. The LAST line before any silent failure tells you exactly which step the server reached. No-op when unset (no overhead). Use to diagnose silent-crash failure modes."
          },
          {
            "name": "OBSIDIAN_BRAIN_LOG_FORMAT",
            "description": "Set to 'ndjson' for one-JSON-object-per-line stderr output (timestamp + level + message + structured fields). Default is human-readable plain text (`obsidian-brain: <message>`). Useful for piping logs into aggregators (Datadog, Loki, Vector, journald) that index structured fields."
          }
        ]
      }
    ],
    "remotes": []
  },
  "dependencies": [],
  "installTargets": [
    "claude-code",
    "claude-desktop",
    "cursor",
    "vscode",
    "trae",
    "cherry-studio",
    "lingma",
    "windsurf",
    "cline",
    "workbuddy"
  ],
  "keywords": [],
  "provenance": {
    "origin": "official-mcp-registry",
    "originalId": "io.github.sweir1/obsidian-brain",
    "originalUrl": "https://registry.modelcontextprotocol.io/v0.1/servers/io.github.sweir1%2Fobsidian-brain/versions/latest",
    "isOfficial": true,
    "status": "active"
  }
}