daniele-chiappa/gosidian

> **Markdown notes your AI agents can read, write, and reason over — via MCP.**
A self-contained markdown vault with a built-in MCP server. Humans
edit through a web UI, agents talk to it over MCP, everything lives
in plain .md files that Obsidian (and every other markdown tool)
reads natively.
**Listed on** the official MCP Registry
as io.github.daniele-chiappa/gosidian,
Glama and
mcpservers.org
Try it in your browser
Launch a free, throwaway gosidian in
GitHub Codespaces — no install,
running on your own Codespaces quota. It builds from source, seeds a small
demo vault, and opens the web UI. Log in with **demo** /
**gosidian-demo**.
Quick start
Three commands: Docker up → token created from the web UI → agent
wired. Your .md vault is persisted under ./vault/; stop the
container and the files are still there.
Other installation paths (source, custom compose, bare-metal):
docs/getting-started.md.
What is gosidian
- **A markdown vault.** Notes are .md files on disk. Open the same
folder in Obsidian, VS Code, vim, or any editor you already use.
Zero lock-in: delete .gosidian/ and you have a pure Obsidian
vault.
- **An MCP server.** 63 typed tools let agents bootstrap a session, ingest files,
search, read, write, link, handoff, self-check, audit. Bearer tokens
and OAuth grants, each narrowed on every request to what its account
may read and write.
- **A web UI.** A Vue 3 single-page app served from the same binary
(built with Vite, embedded via go:embed). Notes, graph, search and
config forms open as windows in a tiling "plancia" workspace —
full-text search, backlinks, graph view, editor with live preview,
audit trail, admin pages for tokens and users.
All three views hit the **same files on disk**. The SQLite FTS5 index
is a cache — drop it and it rebuilds.
Who it's for
- **AI engineers** wiring agents that need persistent structured
memory: note-taking, plans, skills, ADRs, handoffs, audit.
- **Obsidian users** who want a programmable layer on top of a vault
they already trust.
- **Teams** sharing one vault: per-project visibility and grants to
accounts and teams, restricted new accounts with their own project,
self-service tokens per agent that never outrun their owner.
Why gosidian instead of X
- **vs RAG / vector search**: gosidian retrieves by *identity* (path,
tag, frontmatter, backlinks) — more predictable than similarity
search for an agent's working memory. Semantic search is
deliberately deferred: see ADR-007 rationale.
- **vs Obsidian Sync**: Sync mirrors a vault between human devices.
gosidian adds a typed automation surface (MCP) to the same vault.
Not competitive — complementary.
- **vs Notion / Roam**: hosted or proprietary formats; migration is
a project. gosidian's vault is already .md files you can take
anywhere.
FAQ covers the long form.
Compared to similar projects
The "markdown vault + agents" space is crowded. This is where gosidian
sits and where it doesn't, as of September 2026:
| If you are looking at… | What those projects do | Where gosidian differs |
|---|---|---|
| **Obsidian MCP bridges** — mcp-obsidian, obsidian-local-rest-api, wrappers around the Obsidian CLI | Expose a running Obsidian desktop app to agents over MCP. | Headless server: no Obsidian process needed, runs on a box or in a container, multi-user with roles, per-project visibility and grants (accounts and teams), tokens narrowed to each account, audit trail. The vault stays a plain Obsidian vault. |
| **Markdown memory servers** — basic-memory, mcp-vault | Same "files, not a database" idea; usually add hybrid semantic search, a cloud tier or WebDAV sync. | Ships a full web UI, real multi-user, an agent handoff bus and a server-served working method (versioned directives, lint, stale detection). No semantic search by design (ADR-007), no hosted tier. |