obsidian-wiki is a free, open source documentation & knowledge base project written in Python and released under MIT. It has 3,422 GitHub stars, 338 forks and 7 open issues, and was last pushed 8 hours ago. On this registry it ranks #32 of 40 tracked projects in Documentation & Knowledge Base, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available. It gained 11 stars over the last 3 tracked days.

What is obsidian-wiki?

What it is

obsidian-wiki is a Python package and agent skill framework for maintaining a personal knowledge base in Obsidian. It lives in the Obsidian, markdown, and AI agent ecosystem, where agents can read and run skills from a shared .skills/ directory. The project presents itself as a digital brain that remembers what a user figures out, connects new material to existing notes, and answers questions from that knowledge.

The problem it addresses is repeated rediscovery of solved knowledge. A user may solve a hard problem in one repository or conversation, then encounter the same issue months later while the prior answer remains buried in chat logs or unorganized notes. The framework aims to prevent that loss by compiling learned material into interconnected markdown files, so agents and users can query the vault instead of repeatedly asking an LLM the same questions.

Key capabilities

  • It ingests docs, PDFs, chat exports, transcripts, screenshots, URLs, and repository content through commands such as /wiki-ingest, /wiki-update, /wiki-capture, and /wiki-history-ingest.
  • It answers queries with cited [[wikilink]] references through /wiki-query, /wiki-narrate, and /wiki-digest.
  • It builds searchable session indexes with obsidian-wiki sessions-build and obsidian-wiki sessions-query.
  • It maintains vault health through /wiki-lint, /wiki-dedup, /cross-linker, and /wiki-status.
  • It tracks ingested sources with a manifest and tags claims as extracted, ^[inferred], or ^[ambiguous] to distinguish source-backed statements from inference.
  • It exports graph data to graph.json, GraphML, Neo4j Cypher, Postgres SQL, or graph.html.

Who uses it and how

  • Developers and researchers turn codebases, notes, PDFs, transcripts, and screenshots into a markdown vault for Obsidian or a private repository.
  • Agent users save conversations, mine prior Claude history, distill the current repository, and ask later questions from accumulated knowledge.
  • Users with several agent tools share one .skills/ directory, symlinked into each agent, so Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, and Gemini CLI can use the same skills.
  • Knowledge workers use graph coloring, citations, and plain-file ownership to inspect connections, review briefings, and keep the vault local.

Getting started

The typical install path is pip install obsidian-wiki and obsidian-wiki setup --vault ~/brain; uv tool install obsidian-wiki and pipx install obsidian-wiki are also listed. After setup, a user opens a project in an agent and says “set up my wiki”; git clone, Skills CLI, and multiple vaults are also mentioned.

When to use it — and when not to

obsidian-wiki is useful when the user wants an agent-maintained markdown knowledge base inside Obsidian and is willing to operate the vault, source files, and agent skills locally. It is not a hosted knowledge service, and the README does not describe database, storage, SMTP, or paid-product replacement operations; the user must manage the folder, Obsidian, and agent integrations. The project appears early-stage, with a repo age of zero years, seven open issues, and no contributor count shown, so users needing mature maintenance signals should evaluate it cautiously.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

obsidian-wiki

A digital brain you grow with your AI agent.

It remembers what you figure out, connects it to what you already know,
and answers when you ask.

PyPI Ask DeepWiki PRs Welcome X Discord

English | 繁體中文


You solve a hard problem on a Tuesday. Three months later, in a different repo, you solve it again from scratch — because the answer lived in a chat log you'll never find.

This fixes that. Point it at a folder, tell your agent what to remember, and it compiles what you learn into interconnected markdown you own. The pattern comes from Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki gist: compile knowledge once and keep it current, instead of asking an LLM the same questions forever or re-running RAG every time.

Your second brain. Your AI agent is how you grow it.

Every skill here is a markdown file that any agent — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, and a dozen more — reads and runs. No runtime, no API keys, no vendor.

60 seconds

pip install obsidian-wiki
obsidian-wiki setup --vault ~/brain

Using uv or pipx? uv tool install obsidian-wiki and pipx install obsidian-wiki work the same way. (Not uvx — see Installation.)

Then open any project in your agent and say "set up my wiki".

Prefer not to touch a terminal? Give your agent this and it'll do the whole thing:

https://github.com/Ar9av/obsidian-wiki — set up my wiki

Other paths — git clone, Skills CLI, multiple vaults → Installation

What you actually do

Feed it. Anything text-shaped: docs, PDFs, chat exports, meeting transcripts, screenshots, URLs.

/wiki-ingest ~/research
/wiki-update                        # distill the repo you're standing in (code-graph aware)
/wiki-capture                       # save this conversation
/wiki-history-ingest claude         # mine everything you've ever asked Claude

Ask it. Answers come back with [[wikilink]] citations, not vibes.

/wiki-query what do I know about rate limiting?
/wiki-narrate MCP security          # a cited briefing on a topic
/wiki-digest week                   # what did I learn this week?

Find that session you can't name.

obsidian-wiki sessions-build
obsidian-wiki sessions-query "the auth bug with the weird retry loop"

Keep it honest. The vault gets messy on its own; these clean it.

/wiki-lint            # broken links, orphans, contradictions
/wiki-dedup           # "RSC" and "React Server Components" are one page now
/cross-linker         # weave new pages into the graph
/wiki-status          # what's ingested, what's pending, where the hubs are

All 39 skills → Skills Reference

See it

Open the vault in Obsidian and hit the graph view (Cmd/Ctrl+P → "Open graph view"). Say "color my graph" and it tints nodes by tag, category, or visibility.

obsidian-wiki graph view

Or export the whole graph to graph.json, GraphML (Gephi/yEd), Neo4j Cypher, Postgres SQL, or a self-contained interactive graph.html.

Why this and not a notes folder

  • It compiles, it doesn't accumulate. New knowledge merges into existing pages. Contradictions get flagged. Nothing gets duplicated.
  • It only reads what changed. A manifest tracks every source ingested, so the second run processes the delta — not your whole library again.
  • You can tell knowledge from guessing. Every claim is tagged extracted, ^[inferred], or ^[ambiguous], and lint flags pages drifting into speculation.
  • Queries stay cheap as it grows. Titles, tags, and summaries get read before page bodies. 20 pages or 2000, roughly the same cost.
  • It's yours. Plain markdown in a folder. Push it to a private repo, open it in Obsidian, grep it, delete it. No service, no lock-in, nothing leaves your machine.
  • Works where you already work. One .skills/ directory, symlinked into every agent you use.

More → Architecture

Does it actually help?

Structural questions — "how is X connected to Y", "which pages hold my vault together", "what breaks if I delete this" — are the ones a plain agent is worst at. It has to grep every file and reconstruct the link graph by hand, every single time.

Same model, same vault, same questions. The only difference is whether obsidian-wiki was installed:

Plain agent With obsidian-wiki
Time to answer 81s 19s — 4.4× faster
Correct answers 44% 83%
Tool calls used 9.9 4.6
API cost $0.202 $0.208 — unchanged
Question Plain agent With obsidian-wiki
"How is X connected to Y?" 122s 18s
"What topic clusters do I have?" 117s 21s
"Which pages hold my vault together?" 61s 12s
"What breaks if I delete X?" 26s 24s

The accuracy gap is not a rounding error. Asked to trace a connection, the plain agent routed through index.md — which links to every page, so it "found" a short path that means nothing. It made the same mistake in both runs, and named index as one of the most important pages in the vault. The graph the skills query excludes bookkeeping files, so that answer isn't reachable.

Method, and what this doesn't prove

Claude Sonnet, headless, on a real 38-page vault. Questions were asked in plain English with no definition of the graph supplied — the plain agent had Read/Grep/Glob/Bash and had to work it out, which it did competently (it wrote its own centrality implementation rather than guessing). 4 questions × 2 conditions × 2 repetitions, run serially so nothing competed for CPU.

Ground truth came from networkx, not from this project's own code: betweenness matches to 3.5e-18 across every node, and all 630 shortest-path pairs agree.

It's a small study — n=2 per cell on one 38-page vault — so treat the exact percentages as indicative. The wall-clock gaps (3–6×) are much larger than the run-to-run spread; the accuracy figures rest on fewer samples. One run in the "with" column failed outright: the model ignored the CLI, grepped by hand, and got it wrong.

Full data, per-run logs and the scaling measurements are in PR #175.

Documentation

Installation pip, clone, agent-driven setup, multiple vaults
Skills Reference All 39 skills and their slash commands
Agent Compatibility The full matrix + per-agent manual setup
CLI Reference Every obsidian-wiki subcommand
Configuration Config vars, QMD semantic search, _raw/ staging, GitHub sync
Architecture The four ingest stages, vault structure, what we added to Karpathy's pattern
Session Brain Topic graph over your agent session history
Browser Extension Capture pages into the vault, and fill web forms from it

readme truncated — read the full docs on github

Frequently asked questions

Is obsidian-wiki free to use?

obsidian-wiki is open source under the MIT licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does obsidian-wiki do?

Framework for AI agents to build and maintain a digital brain through Obsidian wiki

What is obsidian-wiki written in?

obsidian-wiki is primarily written in Python. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/Ar9av/obsidian-wiki, and it has 3,422 GitHub stars.