Obsidian Librarian#

A second brain for Obsidian, on autopilot. Drop any URL, article, tweet, X post, or pasted text into OpenClaw and it lands in your vault as a clean, categorized, wikilinked markdown note. Then ask your whole vault anything and get grounded answers with citations.

Use this skill when the user wants OpenClaw to store text or a URL in the Obsidian vault as a cleaned, categorized markdown note, or to search and query notes they have already saved.

Trigger shortcuts:

• Treat save this, save it, save this url, and save this link as Obsidian-librarian requests when the same message contains a URL, pasted text, or quoted content to preserve.
• Treat short follow-ups like save it as Obsidian-librarian requests when the immediately preceding user message provided the text or URL to store.
• Treat phrases like search my notes, search my vault, search Obsidian, what do my notes say about ..., ask my vault, and query my saved notes as Obsidian-librarian requests that should run the RAG ask path.
• If the message only says save this or save it with no actual content or URL available in context, do not guess; ask what should be saved.
• If the intent is ambiguous between saving to the local filesystem versus saving to the knowledge vault, prefer the Obsidian vault when the content looks like a note, article, research snippet, or social post.

The vault is mounted in the container at /data/.openclaw/obsidian-vault. Raw inputs are staged in /data/.openclaw/obsidian-vault/_Inbox, then processed into category folders.

Environment#

Required:

• GEMINI_API_KEY: Gemini API key used for both ingest and RAG answer generation.
• OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH: Absolute path to the mounted Obsidian vault.

Conditional:

• APIFY_API_KEY: Required for URL ingestion.

Optional:

• OBSIDIAN_INBOX_FOLDER: Override the inbox folder name. Default: _Inbox.
• OBSIDIAN_GEMINI_MODEL: Primary model override for librarian operations.
• GEMINI_MODEL: Fallback model name when OBSIDIAN_GEMINI_MODEL is unset.
• OBSIDIAN_RAG_INDEX_PATH: Override the local JSON RAG index path.
• SUPABASE_URL: Enable Supabase-backed vector storage.
• SUPABASE_KEY: Supabase API key for vector storage.
• EMBEDDING_MODEL: Embedding model override. Default: gemini-embedding-001.
• EMBEDDING_DIMENSIONS: Embedding size. Default: 384.

URL handling policy:

• Always use Apify to read the URL first.
• For x.com / twitter.com post URLs, use the dedicated Apify tweet actor.
• If an X post contains linked URLs, follow those linked URLs through the same Apify-first path before falling back.
• If direct URL reading fails, run a web-search fallback and stage the search-result snapshot instead.
• If both stages fail, surface the full error back to OpenClaw instead of silently swallowing it.

Supported Inputs#

• Pasted text
• A local text/markdown file
• A blog/article URL
• An existing file already sitting in _Inbox
• A natural-language question about the saved vault

Workflow#

1. Stage the raw source in _Inbox/.
2. Run Gemini pass 1 to clean and structure it into markdown.
3. Run Gemini pass 2 to choose category, tags, source attribution, and candidate wikilinks.
4. Scan existing vault notes for titles and aliases to resolve [[wikilinks]].
5. Write the final note with YAML frontmatter into the chosen category folder.
6. Delete the _Inbox file only after the final note is written successfully.

Ingest From Text File#

bash

python3 {baseDir}/scripts/run_pipeline.py ingest --text-file /data/.openclaw/workspace/input.txt

Ingest From URL#

bash

python3 {baseDir}/scripts/run_pipeline.py ingest --url "https://example.com/article"

Ingest An Existing Inbox File#

bash

python3 {baseDir}/scripts/run_pipeline.py ingest --inbox-file /data/.openclaw/obsidian-vault/_Inbox/some-file.md

Ask The Vault (RAG)#

bash

python3 {baseDir}/scripts/run_pipeline.py --vault-path /data/.openclaw/obsidian-vault ask "What do my notes say about AI agents?" --print-json

Optional flags: --category <Category>, --threshold <float> (default 0.65), --limit <N> (default 5).

Reindex The Vault#

bash

python3 {baseDir}/scripts/run_pipeline.py --vault-path /data/.openclaw/obsidian-vault reindex

Add --file <path> to re-embed a single note instead of the full vault.

Notes#

• For long pasted text, prefer writing it to a temp file under /data/.openclaw/workspace/ and using ingest --text-file.
• Use --title "Custom Title" on ingest for an explicit note title override.
• Use --keep-inbox only when debugging. Normal behavior is to clean up the staged source after success.
• X status URLs preserve deterministic post metadata and captured post content instead of relying on a generic article-style rewrite.
• The pipeline does forward-linking only in v1. Existing notes are not modified.
• URL ingestion requires APIFY_API_KEY in the container environment.
• RAG indexing runs after successful ingests. By default it uses a local JSON index; set SUPABASE_URL and SUPABASE_KEY to use Supabase pgvector instead (requires EMBEDDING_DIMENSIONS=384 to match sql/vault_chunks.sql).
• SUPABASE_URL must point at a Supabase-compatible API surface. All requests are issued against /rest/v1/..., so self-hosted PostgREST needs a gateway or reverse proxy that serves that prefix.
• Before enabling Supabase, apply sql/vault_chunks.sql to the target database. It provisions the vault_chunks table, the HNSW index, and the match_vault_chunks RPC that the ask command calls.