A tool for updating an Obsidian vault's system files to a newer version while keeping personal notes and settings intact.

Use it to check for available updates, preview differences, or upgrade skills, agents, hooks, rules, templates, and related system files.

It reduces the risk of losing vault content during upgrades by creating a backup and showing what changed.

upgrade — Skill for Claude Code by ballred

About the project

Obsidian + Claude Code Accountability System is a personal knowledge-management setup that connects long-term goals with projects, reviews, daily notes, and tasks inside Obsidian. People use it to plan work, track progress, and review whether daily activity supports their goals with help from Claude Code. Its catalogue add-ons implement the system's planning, tracking, and review workflows.

ballred/obsidian-claude-pkm · 1,858 stars · on GitHub

Install

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.

Any agent

npx skills add ballred/obsidian-claude-pkm --skill upgrade

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ballred/obsidian-claude-pkm

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install vault-template, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 skills, 4 agents, 3 hooks.

Wrote 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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ballred/obsidian-claude-pkm/upgrade/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ballred/obsidian-claude-pkm/upgrade)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ballred/obsidian-claude-pkm/upgrade"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ballred/obsidian-claude-pkm/upgrade/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ballred/obsidian-claude-pkm/upgrade"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ballred/obsidian-claude-pkm/upgrade.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 36 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,105 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

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	$0.00036	$0.01105
Opus 5	$0.00018	$0.00553
Sonnet 5	$0.00007	$0.00221
Haiku 4.5	$0.00004	$0.00111

Measured 11d ago against content hash c0c77ad86464, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

upgrade 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 11d 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.

vault-template/.claude/skills/upgrade/SKILL.md · 146 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 146 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Upgrade Skill

Updates your vault's system files to the latest version while preserving all your personal content.

Usage

/upgrade          # Interactive upgrade with backup and diff review
/upgrade check    # Preview what's changed without making modifications

What Gets Updated (System Files)

.claude/skills/*/SKILL.md — Skill definitions
.claude/agents/*.md — Agent configurations
.claude/hooks/*.sh — Automation scripts
.claude/rules/*.md — Convention rules
.claude/output-styles/*.md — Output style definitions
.claude/settings.json — Permissions and hook config
CLAUDE.md — Root context file (merged carefully)
Templates/*.md — Note templates

What Never Gets Touched (Your Content)

Daily Notes/** — Your daily journal entries
Goals/** — Your goal files and reviews
Projects/** — Your project folders and CLAUDE.md files
Archives/** — Your archived content
Inbox/** — Your captured items
CLAUDE.local.md — Your personal overrides
vault-config.json — Your preferences

Upgrade Process

Step 1: Check for Updates

Read the current version from CLAUDE.md (look for "System Version:" line).

Compare with the upstream repo. If using git:

git fetch origin
git log HEAD..origin/main --oneline

If not a git repo or no remote, inform user they need to download the latest vault-template/ manually.

Step 2: Create Backup

Before any changes, create a timestamped backup:

BACKUP_DIR=".backup/upgrade-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)"
mkdir -p "$BACKUP_DIR"
cp -r .claude "$BACKUP_DIR/"
cp CLAUDE.md "$BACKUP_DIR/"
cp -r Templates "$BACKUP_DIR/" 2>/dev/null

Tell the user: "Backup created at $BACKUP_DIR"

Step 3: Diff Review

For each system file that differs from upstream:

Show a summary of what changed (additions, removals, modifications)
Ask user to confirm: "Apply this update? (yes/skip/stop)"
If yes: apply the change
If skip: leave this file unchanged
If stop: halt the upgrade (backup remains, partial changes preserved)

Read the full file on GitHub · 146 lines

Changes

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.

11d ago First seen · 146 lines · 36 tokens per session scan A c0c77ad86464

Subscribe to this mod's changes

upgrade is a skill published in the GitHub repository ballred/obsidian-claude-pkm (1,858 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 36 tokens to every session and 1,105 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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upgrade