Obsidian for Agent Zero

Gives Agent Zero its own Obsidian vault. The plugin installs Obsidian, runs it on a virtual display, and exposes the official obsidian CLI so the agent can read, create, search, and organize markdown notes — daily notes, tasks, properties, backlinks — in a persistent, A0-owned vault. It also adds an Obsidian surface to the right-side Canvas so you can see the live app (graph view, editor) on demand.

Support

If this plugin is useful to you, you can support the developer.

What it can do

• Work with notes (obsidian-notes skill) — read/create/append/search notes, append to the daily note, manage tasks, set properties/tags, follow backlinks, all via obsidian-cli.
• Keep a knowledge base (obsidian-vault-keeping skill) — maintain a project-first vault (area folders, hub notes, dated session notes, [[wikilinks]]) and log work as it happens, rather than dropping flat notes.
• See the vault (obsidian-canvas-view skill) — open the Obsidian icon in the right-side Canvas rail to view the real Obsidian GUI (graph view, editor, panes), not just the note text.

On first run the plugin seeds a starting structure into the vault (00-Index/, 10-Projects/, 20-Knowledge/, 30-Research/, 90-Archive/, Daily/, a Home map, and daily-notes config). It's a sensible default — it never overwrites existing notes, and you can restructure however you like.

Setup

1. Install via the Plugin Hub, a GitHub repo URL, or by uploading the plugin ZIP, then enable it.
2. On first run the plugin downloads and installs Obsidian (~85 MB), seeds its config to open an A0-owned vault with the CLI enabled, and launches it headless. Restart / re-enable so it comes up.
3. No API key, no manual config. Ask something like "save a note about X" or "what's in my vault about Y?" and the agent will use obsidian-cli.

Requires a Debian-based image (installs Obsidian via .deb), Xvfb (present in the standard A0 Docker image), and outbound network on first run.

How it works

• Obsidian is an Electron desktop app with no headless build, so it runs under a virtual display (Xvfb). The CLI talks to that running instance over a unix socket.
• Headless use is enabled by seeding "cli": true into Obsidian's obsidian.json and registering the vault as open — no GUI interaction needed.
• A /usr/local/bin/obsidian-cli wrapper pins HOME/XDG so the agent's shell reaches the same socket the app opened.
• The Obsidian app stays running (the CLI needs a live instance), so it holds a few hundred MB of RAM — similar to a headless browser.

Seeing the vault (Obsidian Canvas surface)

The plugin adds its own Obsidian icon to Agent Zero's right-side Canvas rail (next to Browser, Desktop, and Editor). Click it to stream the live Obsidian app — graph view, editor, side panes — right in the canvas. Open Obsidian's graph view from its left ribbon to see your linked notes.

• One Obsidian instance backs both the surface and obsidian-cli, so notes you create via the CLI show up live in the surface, and vice-versa.
• Copy & paste with your own machine. Select text in the surface and press Ctrl/Cmd+C — it lands on your local clipboard, so you can paste it into any app on your computer (Windows, macOS, Linux). Ctrl/Cmd+V goes the other way: it pastes your local clipboard into the note. The surface is a live screencast of the remote app, so the plugin bridges the clipboard across it for you. (Copying lands on the local clipboard via the async Clipboard API on https/localhost, falling back to a legacy path when the UI is served over plain http on a LAN.)
• The stream starts the first time you open the surface (a few seconds), and is reverse-proxied through Agent Zero — no extra ports are exposed.
• Under the hood it's xpra shadow --html=on of Obsidian's display, registered with A0's built-in virtual-desktop gateway (the same machinery as the Desktop surface). Needs xpra + xpra-html5 (present in the standard A0 Docker image).

Opening notes from the A0 desktop

Right-click a .md file on the Agent Zero desktop and choose Open With Obsidian (or launch Obsidian from the Applications menu) and it opens in the Obsidian Canvas panel, showing that note in your live vault.

This is wired through a small launcher the plugin installs (/usr/local/bin/obsidian-open) — the system Obsidian launcher is repointed at it. The launcher hands the clicked file to the already-running vault instance (via obsidian-cli) and signals the web UI to open the Canvas panel. Files that live outside the vault (e.g. on the desktop) are linked into an Inbox/ folder in the vault so Obsidian can open them; edits write back to the original.

Why a launcher? Obsidian is an Electron app that refuses to run as root without --no-sandbox, so the stock desktop entry silently crashes on the A0 desktop. The launcher avoids that by talking to the running instance instead of starting a new one — and the note shows in the Canvas panel, not as a separate desktop window. (Uninstalling restores the original desktop entry.)

Where your notes live

The vault is kept outside the plugin folder (default /a0/usr/obsidian, on the persistent volume) so it survives uninstall, reinstall, and updates. Only Obsidian's app config/cache lives inside the plugin (and is cleaned up on uninstall).

Configuration

default_config.yaml:

Download integrity

Obsidian doesn't publish a checksum file, so by default the plugin trusts HTTPS from the official obsidianmd GitHub release (and apt/dpkg verify the package's internal integrity). For stronger assurance, pin obsidian_version and set expected_sha256 to that .deb's hash — the plugin then verifies the download and refuses to install on mismatch.

Uninstalling

Uninstall via the Plugins UI: it stops Obsidian, removes the obsidian-cli wrapper, and uninstalls Obsidian only if this plugin installed it. Your vault is preserved (it's your data) — set delete_vault_on_uninstall: true only if you really want it deleted.

Citing

If you use this in your work, please cite it (use the "Cite this repository" button on GitHub, or):

@misc{a0obsidianplugin2026,
  title        = {a0-obsidian-plugin: Obsidian vault for Agent Zero},
  author       = {King0James0},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/King0James0/a0-obsidian-plugin}},
  note         = {GitHub repository}
}

License

MIT — see LICENSE.