Connecting Claude and Obsidian: A Step-by-Step Guide

today I'll show you how you can connect Claude and Obsidian together to take your thinking to the next level watch

here as Claude is creating automatic connections between all of my different nodes which leads to insights that I

wouldn't have come up with on my own with this system your ideas and research work for you without you having to put

in any extra effort at all so let's see how you can set it up how do we connect Claude with Obsidian well there's a

couple of steps you need to follow but if you just follow along with me you'll be there in no time there's a couple of

things you need first of all you need Claw for desktop so you cannot use the web client for this because you need the

full desktop application to use MCP servers it's a very simple install next you need to have Python installed and

you need to install UV which is a package manager for Python because this is going to be the tool that Claude will

call to start up the MCP server whenever Cloud Desktop starts again no worries if you don't have this all the links will

be in the description next we're going to be using this MCP Obsidian server by a great open source contributor i've

checked out a couple different variants of these servers and some of them are read only but this one also allows you

to create files which is very nice and I'll show that later on so once you've installed the cloud desktop app I would

recommend making sure you've got UV installed the way that you can install that in Mac or Linux is with a simple

command so I'm going to go ahead and paste that in my terminal just to make sure I've got it all installed and there

you go it is and then the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and clone that MCP Obsidian server great so

now if I check out ls you can see that I've got MCP Obsidian installed right there if I go into the folder you will

see that there's couple of files you know it indicates it's a Python project etc so what else do we need well if we

check out the repository instructions you see that we need to get an Obsidian REST API key but Obsidian doesn't really

have a REST API available by default however there's a great community plugin that we can enable in our vault that

gives us a REST API so what we're going to do is open up Obsidian and I'm going to go ahead and create a new vault so

I'm going to go and click on file then I'm doing going to do open vault and I'm going to create a new vault in the same

location where I put the MCP project but and I'm going to put this vault in the same folder as the MCP project you don't

have to do that but it's just convenient for me to show it off and I'm just going to call it MCP test for

now then in terms of folder I'm going to put it in that folder where I put the MCP server again not necessary but I

just prefer to do that in this case so I open up the vault and what I can do now is in the settings I will go to

community plugins and turn on community plugins then I'm going to go ahead and browse the community plugins and I'm

going to find the rest API plugin right here and this is the one you need it's used by a lot of different people and

it's quite a great plugin i'm going to install it and immediately enable it as well and then check out the options

because in the options we will find the API key now I'm just showing this API key in plain text it doesn't matter

because I only run this locally you could technically host your MCP server on some kind of cloud service and then

that way of course you will need this API key but in my case it's just something that's necessary but yeah it

doesn't really hurt for me to share it because I'm running all of this locally no other computer can actually access

this API server so it's totally fine now I'm going to go ahead and copy this API key and we need to place it somewhere

right but where do we actually place it well I'm going to go and reopen that terminal of mine because I'm going to

put it in a N file in that folder that we cloned so I'm just going to use Nano to create a new file you can also just

do this in VS Code or text editor it's totally fine and then you want to call this Obsidian API key now I'm getting

that from the repository instructions you see here that you can create a N file and you need to use this Obsidian

API key value and then paste your API key in there so I'm going to go ahead and do exactly that i pasted in the API

key and now we can simply save this file and now if I do ls again you will see that we've got this.n file which will be

referred to every time the server starts up now then how do we actually make sure that clone can access this MCP server

well we have to change the MCP server config for that and there's a couple of different options out there but I'm

going to follow this one here there's a development server configuration which I think is a great one if you're just

starting out and you can see here that UV is being used by claw to start up the server so one thing I do need to know is

the directory where I put this folder in so I'm going to go ahead and check that out so I'm going to cd out of that

specific folder and then just check out what my current working directory is and then that's great i'm going to refer to

that as well but where do we actually put this JSON configuration well for that let's open Claude and have a look

at where the MCP config actually is so once you open Claude what you can do is you can go into the CLA settings and

then check out developer and click on edit config and then you'll eventually just land in the location where your

config JSON is defined so I'm going to go and open this one with just a simple text editor and you'll be able to see

that it's just a plain file at the moment there's not much in here so I'm going to go ahead and copy this

definition from that repository and paste it in here just going to move some things around here because I do of

course want to change that directory to actually refer to the directory where I've got um this MCP server installed so

again I have printed out the directory in here so I'm going to go ahead and paste that and replace the value here

with that now that should be all you need to do to get it to work but in my experience I have had trouble with

Claude finding this UV command so what I do recommend you to do is check where exactly UV was installed by typing a

command like which UV and in my case I'm actually just going to copy this direct path where UV

is installed whether you have to do this or not depends on your configuration your machine but I found this to be much

more reliable so I'm going to save it like this so it's going to call UV with this directory command and it will run

the MCP Obsidian server the nice thing about UV is that it will automatically install and keep dependencies uh

installed for you and you don't have to just do that manually it will just do it the first time that this command runs so

this is all that you should need to do so I'm going to go ahead and quit that config and I'm just going to also quit

claude and restart cloud desktop here now claude is pretty silent it doesn't really tell you much about

whether or not the MCP server is installed or not however you can actually see that I've now got this kind

of tool icon with an eight available because I've got eight MCP tools available to me now so I can do things

like appending content to a new or existing file in a vault i can do a complex search get file contents it's

really cool but I'm just going to go ahead and show you how this actually works so let's go and open our obsidian

vault right next to Claude to see how Cloud can investigate and update the vault as we go cool so you can see that

I've got an empty vault and just to test I can ask it to create a new file with random facts in Obsidian so this is just

a nice random test to see if it even works in the first place and now you can see that it's going to run that tool

from MCP Obsidian and you can see that it passes parameters like the file path the content and now I have to give

permission for it to use that tool i'm just going to allow it for this chat because it's convenient to just be able

to you know not have to click that button every single time right and now you can indeed see that there's this

random facts markdown file really cool stuff now of course Claude is pretty smart so when you wanted to actually

consistently create things like connections in your graph view it can also do that it all just depends on how

well you define what claude is supposed to be doing for you so in my case I'm curious to see if it can actually rework

this file and maybe create a couple of connections and then create a couple of other files to prove that it can

understand how to create connections independently so let's go ahead and ask something like that right i want you to

prove you can create meaningful connections to fill up my graph view in Obsidian edit

the file to add a bunch of connections and add a few more files to cross reference let's see how it picks up on

this task so first it's going to edit that file sure go

ahead and then you can already see boom we're getting interesting things in our graph view i'm going to go ahead and

highlight that a little bit because I know it's quite small let's go ahead and zoom in so you can indeed see whoa okay

it's going quite quickly you can see it's starting to add animal facts plant facts and random facts and the random

facts whoa okay I can barely keep up it's connected to a couple different elements so oh goodness maybe we should

give this a second to process because it just keeps adding new and new information um yeah you can see that on

the left it's just creating new and new files so I'm actually just going to go ahead and just stop it from generating

because I'm happy with this but it's going a bit too crazy i just want to show how it works so you can see here

for example that random facts is connected to our history facts and that is connected to historical oddities so

you can really see that Claude understands the point of obsidian and how to create these different

connections so I can for example click on historical oddities and get into this new file that it created now the nice

thing about this is that it means that you can just give it a dump of whatever notes you want to take and then it will

create the connections for you and keep them up to date if you might be missing connections and I find this to be

amazing because while I like the idea behind Obsidian and creating these connections I find that I myself often

forget to create them when I need to so it's really nice to have a system that could create them for you proactively or

just review your entire vault for you to see if you miss any connections really cool stuff so I'm going to give you some

pro tips here that you should really follow to get the most out of this plug-in because while I showed you some

random examples you want to make this work for your use case right so I recommend you to create a separate cloud

project and call it something like Obsidian Note Taker now the great thing about having a separate project is that

you can make cloud much more proactive and always using this Obsidian MCP tool so for example I can set project

instructions and say "Use the Obsidian MCP tool as much as possible to help me out." The great thing is with something

like this is that you can also immediately create a structured vault for example let's say that you want to

use the PAR method to keep track of your life's projects and to organize your work well I can for example ask Claude

to fill up my vault with example folder file structures so I can follow the PAR method and if I do this you will see how

easy it is to actually set up that initial fault so I'm just going to allow it to use MCP Obsidian for this entire

chat and on the right here I actually cleared out that uh fault that we created previously just so we have a

clean start again and once we get started here you can actually see that it creates a project folder an areas

folder and all of them have different readme files which is great we're starting to get the resources folder now

as well and then we are missing one we should be getting something else here yep here we go so we also have the

archive folder which is great so even if you're not familiar with the para method you can ask Claude what it means and how

much your current vault complies with the para method and then you see that it already proactively fills it with just a

couple of examples like the annual tax filling project here or the health area with fitness tracking and medical

information now of course this is all just examples but you can see how powerful this is and how you can apply

it to your workflow and whatever way you use Obsidian now if you thought this video was useful you should really check

out the community in the description below where I teach you how you can become an AI native engineer using tools

like this to make yourself more productive and work together with AI models to create your future i'll see

you there