install

A guided installer for vault-memory in an Obsidian vault, including its command-line service, search engine, plugin, and connection settings.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to choose Ollama or CPU-only ContextFit, register one or more vaults, build the first index, install the Obsidian plugin, and test the connection.
Why use it?
It walks through the choices and setup steps needed to make the vault searchable by an MCP-aware coding agent.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/owrede/vault-memory/install
Any agent
npx skills add owrede/vault-memory --skill install
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/owrede/vault-memory

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 132 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,740 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan D 3 findings. Scan, not verified.
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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00132 $0.02740
Opus 5 $0.00066 $0.01370
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00548
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00274

Measured yesterday against content hash 53d33b472753, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade D, and why

install scanned grade D with 3 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 yesterday.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (config-wizard.sh, setup.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

Asks for rootmediumPrivilege escalation

A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.

curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_22.x | sudo -E bash - && sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Downloads and executes remote codehighSupply chain

curl | sh runs whatever the server returns today, which is not necessarily what it returned when this was reviewed.

curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh && (systemctl --user start ollama || ollama serve &)

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

- **macOS:** Homebrew. If missing: `/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"`
plugins/vmem/skills/install/SKILL.md · 240 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 240 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/vmem:install — Guided vault-memory setup

You (the agent) drive this install interactively. Do NOT blindly run a script: ask the two decisions below first, explain the trade-offs so the user can choose, then install everything required for the chosen path. Use AskUserQuestion for the decisions and Bash for the steps. Every step is idempotent — re-running on a complete setup should report "already done".

The end state of a successful install:

  • vault-memory CLI / MCP server installed and on PATH
  • All dependencies for the chosen engine present (see per-engine sections)
  • The target vault(s) registered in ~/.vault-memory/config.toml
  • Initial index built
  • .mcp.json written into each vault root so an MCP-aware client auto-spawns the server
  • The Obsidian plugin installed into .obsidian/plugins/vault-memory/ (when a vault has .obsidian/)
  • MCP smoketest passes

Decision 1 — Which retrieval engine?

Ask the user with AskUserQuestion. Present BOTH options with this comparison so they can make an educated choice:

Ollama (vector / embeddings) ContextFit (CPU-only)
How it retrieves Neural embeddings + sqlite-vec ANN + BM25, RRF-fused (semantic search) Token-native BM25 + Semantic-IDs (lexical/structural)
Hardware Practically needs a GPU (or is slow on CPU); a model stays resident (~1.1 GB for bge-m3) CPU-only, no GPU, no model (~41 MB deps)
Extra dependency Ollama + a pulled embedding model Python + contextfit (via pipx)
Strengths Best semantic recall; paraphrase/cross-lingual matching Fast ingest + query, tiny footprint, fully local, no model download
Ideal for A workstation/laptop with a GPU or spare RAM Resource-limited / non-GPU hosts (e.g. a Synology NAS), privacy-strict setups
Tradeoff Heavy; GPU/RAM pressure Lexical, not vector-semantic — exact/structural matches over fuzzy paraphrase

Both build the same SQLite content layer, so graph/sections/frontmatter/stats tools work either way. The choice only changes the search engine and its dependencies. The engine is per-vault — different vaults can use different engines, and it can be changed later by re-indexing.

Read the full file on GitHub · 240 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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.

  1. yesterday First seen · 240 lines · 0 tokens per session scan D 53d33b472753

Subscribe to this mod's changes

install is a skill published in the GitHub repository owrede/vault-memory (0 stars, last pushed 23d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 132 tokens to every session and 2,740 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it D with 3 findings (asks for root, downloads and executes remote code, makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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