FAQ

Do I need the companion plugin? Only for the command palette and bridge tools (Dataview, Tasks, Templater, OCR, QuickAdd, Excalidraw, Periodic Notes, Workspaces, Bookmarks, make.md, Obsidian Git, Remotely Save). Direct file ops, frontmatter, tags, links, and search over the cache work without it. A tool missing a dependency returns plugin_missing naming the plugin. See Plugin Bridges.

Is my vault data sent anywhere? No, unless you configure a cloud embedding provider (OpenAI / Voyage / Cohere) or the optional inference gateway — only then do chunks leave your machine, and only to that provider. With the default Ollama provider everything stays local. All tools are openWorldHint: false.

Why do I only see five tools? That's the default triad facade: find_capability / describe_capability / call_capability keep agent context lean (search and fetch are the standard knowledge-connector pair ChatGPT deep research requires) while every tool stays reachable (and directly callable by name). Set toolFacade.mode to domain or flat for other shapes. See Tool Reference.

Does it do GraphRAG / hybrid retrieval? Yes — shipped and measured: vault_graph_search (vector seeds + wikilink expansion fused with RRF), FTS5 BM25, and vec0 dense search, gated by an n=250 golden set with a statistical ship rule (contextual chunk enrichment measured +0.223 nDCG and defaults on). Mechanisms that did not earn a default ship dark behind flags: rerankers have recorded A/B results, learned sparse and query decomposition have none. See Architecture.

What is the "work-memory tier"? A quarantined second store (experiential.db) for agent work episodes and retrieval telemetry — physically separate from your authored notes, readable only through eligibility-gated tools (work_search, work_episodes), with a poison scanner on ingest and a hash-chain-audited forget. Content capture is off by default. See Architecture.

Local or cloud embeddings? Either, per vault. The schema default is local Ollama (nomic-embed-text, 768-dim, with title+breadcrumb chunk context) — a config default only, and now deprecated. Seven others are one config line away: openai, voyage, cohere, bge-m3, openai-compatible (anything OpenAI-shaped), model-tier, module. A local-Ollama vault and a cloud-Voyage vault coexist in one server. See Configuration.

Can I serve multiple vaults? Yes — multi-vault is native. Each vault is logically isolated: its rows in the shared SQLite cache are scoped by vault_id (not a per-vault DB file; the embedding provider is server-global), under its own ACL slice (per-vault ACL overrides supported). Adding/removing a vault needs a restart; editing an existing vault's config can be applied live with reload_vault. See Architecture.

Does it support Bases (.base)? Yes — native, with a real expression-DSL evaluator: read_base, create_base, update_base, query_base. Canvas and Excalidraw are supported too.

How do I expose it to a remote agent safely? Run the server next to the vault and tunnel the MCP endpoint (Cloudflare Tunnel / SSH forward) — Topology A in Deployment Modes. The server hard-refuses to bind a non-loopback host without JWT auth, so remote exposure forces real auth. See Security and ACL.

Do I need Rust to install it? No. Prebuilt native modules ship for eight platform triples (linux x64/arm64 × gnu/musl, darwin x64/arm64, win32 x64/arm64). Anything else uses a numerically identical pure-JS fallback. Rust is only needed to build the native module yourself.

Which MCP clients work? Any MCP 2025-11-25 client. STDIO for Claude Desktop / Claude Code / Cursor; Streamable HTTP for HTTP local/remote; an MCPB bundle for one-click hosts. The server also exposes MCP Resources and Prompts. HITL uses a custom elicit_token pattern, so confirmations work even on clients without native elicitation support.

How do I confirm a destructive op? The tool returns elicit_required with an elicit_token; re-invoke the same tool with that token within 5 minutes. Tokens are single-use and bound to the exact tool + args. Some operations (e.g. git_commit, command execution) sit on a hardcoded HITL floor and always confirm. See Security and ACL.

How do I make the whole server read-only? Set acl.readOnly: true — the kill switch short-circuits every write/delete.

Is it affiliated with Obsidian? No. Independent, AGPL-3.0-only. "Obsidian" is a trademark of Dynalist Inc.

Where are the deep docs? ARCHITECTURE.md, docs/G2.1-tools.md, and the docs/ Astro Starlight site (quickstart, threat model, cutover guide).