Real AI agent for your vault. Coworker, Copilot & thinking partner, that maintains your memory & knowledge, adapts to your workflows, uses plugins, skills & tools with full safety controls. BYOK & MCP
Agentic AI operating layer for your vault.
You describe a task, it plans, searches, reads, writes, and reports back. Every action is visible. Every write needs your approval. Every change is undoable in one click.
Free. Open source. Local-first. Works with cloud models, with your existing ChatGPT or Copilot subscription, or fully offline with Ollama or LM Studio.
Documentation | [Install from Obsidian] | Community page
"Vault Operator might be the best Obsidian agentic AI plugin out there."
Nick, Buy Me a Coffee
"I've just discovered your wonderful plugin, which to me is way more than a simple plugin. It is a real harness inside Obsidian. That's awesome!"
arkham000, GitHub
"Vault Operator is one of the most interesting and powerful Obsidian plugins I've tried so far. The combination of agent functionality, vault access and document processing is particularly impressive."
Stapledon-de, GitHub
"Love your work with Vault Operator."
mikaljrue, Buy Me a Coffee
"Vault Operator plugin is exactly what I was looking for. The ability to plug in MCP, the support for various models and providers, the skills, and workflows. I am really looking forward to get my hands dirty. I am hoping I won't need to use VS Code + GitHub Copilot to help me manage my vault anymore."
Buy Me a Coffee supporter
"I have only just started, but this is real motivation to get back into Obsidian again."
hkocam, Buy Me a Coffee (translated from German)
A chatbot reads your prompt and answers. Vault Operator runs a loop: it picks an action, executes it against your vault, feeds the result back to the model, and continues until the task is done.
.obsidian-agentignore
file.Drop a PDF or a Markdown source into the chat and ask for an ingest. The agent produces a clean source note with block IDs on every key claim, so each fact links back to the exact paragraph in the original.
Two paths:
/ingest
/ingest-deep
Sense-making tutorial | Block-level provenance concept
A local vector index over your vault, plus full-text keyword search, graph expansion through wikilinks, and a local cross-encoder reranker. Ask "what do I know about X?" and the agent finds notes whose meaning is related, even when none of them contain the words you used.
The background analysis also surfaces note pairs that discuss similar topics without any wikilink between them, so you can spot connections you never wrote down.
Turn project notes into a Word document, structured data into Excel, or meeting notes into a draft PowerPoint deck. DOCX and XLSX output is clean and reliable. PPTX is in beta: corporate template cloning is not supported in this version, so treat client-facing decks as a starting point and finish them by hand.
The vault health check audits your knowledge graph for orphans, broken links, missing backlinks, weak clusters, inconsistent tags, and over-connected hubs. Findings come with actions: apply a mechanical fix, open a discussion with the agent, or dismiss. Every repair creates a checkpoint you can undo.
Vault Operator is fail-closed. Write operations need your approval unless you opted into auto-approve for that category. Every task creates checkpoints in a shadow git repository (separate from your own git history). Click "Undo all changes" in the chat and the files go back. Sensitive folders are gated by a .obsidian-agentignore
file at the vault root.
Safety and control guide | Checkpoints concept
Vault Operator requires Obsidian 1.13 or newer.
For semantic search and the ingest workflows, also configure an embedding model in Settings > Vault Operator > Providers > Embeddings. The Quick start tutorial covers every step.
Full documentation lives at pssah4.github.io/vault-operator.
For end users:
/ingest-deep
.For developers:
git clone https://github.com/pssah4/vault-operator.git
cd vault-operator
npm install
npm run build
Then copy main.js
, manifest.json
, and styles.css
from the repo root into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/vault-operator/
. For watch mode and auto-deploy during development, point PLUGIN_DIR
in .env
at your test vault and run npm run dev
.
Requirements: Obsidian 1.13 or newer, desktop only, Node.js 18+ for building.
Vault Operator is local-first. No telemetry, no analytics, no accounts.
The plugin makes network requests in three situations, all under your control:
web_search
tool, going to Brave or Tavily.The plugin also uses a few Node.js capabilities that go beyond the standard Obsidian API: filesystem access for the local knowledge database and the office document pipeline, shadow git for checkpoints, sandbox process spawning for evaluate_expression
, and optional LibreOffice spawning for presentation rendering. All writes stay under the vault path or the plugin data directory. Commands are fixed binaries with structured arguments; the agent does not construct shell commands from chat text.
API keys are encrypted via Electron's safeStorage
(OS keychain on macOS, Credential Manager on Windows, libsecret on Linux). Where safeStorage
is not available, keys fall back to plain plugin settings.
Apache 2.0.