obsidian-core

Obsidian CLI Reference

CLI version tested: 1.12.4 (shipped Feb 2026, early access — syntax may evolve; update this file if commands change)

Preflight Check

Before any CLI operation, verify the binary is available and Obsidian is running:

which obsidian > /dev/null 2>&1 || { echo "obsidian CLI not in PATH"; exit 1; }
pgrep -x Obsidian > /dev/null 2>&1 || { echo "Obsidian app must be running for CLI commands"; exit 1; }

If Obsidian is not running, prompt the user to open it before retrying.

Stderr Policy

The CLI always emits a version-loading line to stderr on every invocation.

• Reads: Use 2>/dev/null — safe to suppress, exit code still signals real errors
• Writes: Check exit code; do not blindly suppress stderr (surface real failures)

# Read (stderr suppression OK)
obsidian daily:read 2>/dev/null

# Write (check exit code)
obsidian create path="Inbox/Note.md" content="..." && echo "Created" || echo "Failed"

Path Parameters

• Always prefer path= for automation — deterministic, uses exact vault-relative path
• Use file= only for interactive/fuzzy lookups where the user provides a note name

Vault Folder Conventions

Folder	Purpose
Ideas and Journal/YYYY-MM-DD.md	Daily notes
Sessions/YYYY-MM-DD-description.md	Session logs (kebab-case filenames)
Inbox/	Quick capture, triaged weekly
Datadog/Active/	Active work notes
99-Meta/	Templates and guides

Core Commands

Daily Notes

obsidian daily:read 2>/dev/null                              # Read today's daily note
obsidian daily:append content="- [ ] Task" 2>/dev/null      # Append to daily note
obsidian daily:prepend content="## Focus\n- [ ] Task"       # Prepend to daily note

Files

obsidian read path="Sessions/2026-03-02-example.md" 2>/dev/null
obsidian create path="Inbox/Note.md" content="..."
obsidian append path="Inbox/Note.md" content="..."
obsidian files folder=Inbox 2>/dev/null

Search

obsidian search:context query="terraform" format=json limit=10 2>/dev/null
obsidian search:context query="topic" path="Sessions" format=json limit=10 2>/dev/null
obsidian backlinks path="Sessions/2026-03-02-example.md" 2>/dev/null
obsidian backlinks file="note name" counts 2>/dev/null
obsidian orphans 2>/dev/null
obsidian deadends 2>/dev/null
obsidian unresolved 2>/dev/null

Tasks

obsidian tasks todo 2>/dev/null     # All open tasks vault-wide
obsidian tasks daily 2>/dev/null    # Today's tasks (done + todo)

Properties & Tags

obsidian property:set path="Note.md" name="status" value="done"
obsidian tag name="meeting" verbose 2>/dev/null

Content Escaping

• Use \n for newlines in content strings
• Quote values containing spaces: content="My note title"
• For large multi-line content, write a temp file and pipe if the CLI supports it

Error Handling

• Empty output from format=json = no results (not an error)
• Non-zero exit from write commands = failure; surface the error to the user
• If the CLI returns nothing for a read command, the note does not exist yet