Obsidian Local REST API is a plugin that exposes an Obsidian vault through a secure, authenticated REST API and Model Context Protocol server. Scripts, browser extensions, and AI agents use it to read, search, create, update, and delete notes and other vault files. Its catalogue add-ons provide instructions and settings for using the integration.
Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx agentmods add instructions/coddingtonbear/obsidian-local-rest-api/agents-mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/coddingtonbear/obsidian-local-rest-apiWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/coddingtonbear/obsidian-local-rest-api/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/coddingtonbear/obsidian-local-rest-api/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/coddingtonbear/obsidian-local-rest-api/agents-md.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.02334 | $0.02334 |
| Opus 5 | $0.01167 | $0.01167 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00467 | $0.00467 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00233 | $0.00233 |
Grade A, and why
obsidian-local-rest-api AGENTS.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 196 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Agent Instructions
Commit Process
Commit cadence
Commit frequently in small, self-contained increments. Each commit on main must leave the repository in a working state — no broken builds, no failing unit tests. A commit that fixes a bug, a commit that adds a test, and a commit that updates documentation are all valid atomic units. Do not batch unrelated changes into a single commit.
When working on fixing a bug while on a branch off of main, follow a Test-Driven Development approach and start by creating (and committing) failing tests that will later be fixed by fixes your subsequent commits.
Push Automatically
After making any particular commit, you can feel free to push that branch to the remote.
Running tests before committing
Run the unit test suite before every commit:
npm test
Integration tests require a live Obsidian instance with the plugin's insecure HTTP server enabled and OBSIDIAN_API_KEY set. Run them when Obsidian is available, and always run them before pushing changes that touch endpoint behavior:
npm run test:integration
Two groups of integration tests are skipped by default and opt in via environment variable, because each needs something of the person running them:
OBSIDIAN_ACTIVE_FILE=<vault-relative path>— enables theactive_file_*tests, which need that file open in Obsidian.OBSIDIAN_TEST_OPEN_FILE=1— enables theopen_filetest. It is off by default because opening a file pulls Obsidian to the foreground and takes keyboard focus mid-run, so keystrokes meant for another window can land in the opened note.
Commit message format
Use a plain imperative subject line (no type: prefix). Always include a Co-Authored-By trailer crediting the AI assistant that helped author the commit.
Short imperative description
Longer description of what this work is, why these changes were made, and any decisions, trade-offs, and known limitations that may be useful to future readers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <[email protected]>
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 6d ago First seen · 196 lines · 2,334 tokens per session scan A a8913e9dab78
obsidian-local-rest-api AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository coddingtonbear/obsidian-local-rest-api (2,894 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 2,334 tokens to every session, about $0.0117 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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