obsidian

Obsidian Vault Management

Goal

Create, update, and organize notes in an Obsidian vault programmatically. Query notes with Dataview syntax. Maintain a consistent vault structure.

Vault Structure

vault/
├── Daily Notes/          # YYYY-MM-DD.md
├── Projects/             # One folder per project
├── Areas/                # Ongoing responsibilities
├── Resources/            # Reference material
├── Archive/              # Inactive notes
└── _templates/           # Note templates

Use PARA method (Projects / Areas / Resources / Archive) as the default organization.

Frontmatter Conventions

Every note should have frontmatter:

---
title: Note Title
date: 2024-01-15
tags: [topic, subtopic]
aliases: [alternative-name]
status: draft | active | archived
related: [[Other Note]], [[Another Note]]
---

• date: ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD)
• tags: lowercase, hyphenated
• aliases: alternate names for search/linking
• status: lifecycle state
• related: explicit links (supplement to inline wikilinks)

Creating Notes Programmatically

Basic note creation

from pathlib import Path
from datetime import datetime

def create_note(vault_path: str, folder: str, title: str, content: str, tags: list[str] = []) -> Path:
    vault = Path(vault_path)
    target_dir = vault / folder
    target_dir.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
    
    # Sanitize title for filename
    filename = title.replace("/", "-").replace(":", "-") + ".md"
    note_path = target_dir / filename
    
    frontmatter = f"""---
title: {title}
date: {datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d")}
tags: {tags}
---

"""
    note_path.write_text(frontmatter + content, encoding="utf-8")
    return note_path

Daily note

def create_daily_note(vault_path: str, template: str = "") -> Path:
    today = datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
    content = template or f"""# {today}

## Tasks
- [ ] 

## Notes

## Links
"""
    return create_note(vault_path, "Daily Notes", today, content)