search_notesLABSCO SUMMARY
It hands the search to ripgrep, so the patterns are ones you already know.
A pattern and any flags you want go straight to ripgrep, which means a vault of thousands of notes answers as fast as the command line does. Reading then parses the hits into content, structured frontmatter and tags rather than raw text.
What it is
A read-only server over an Obsidian vault on your own disk. Search runs through ripgrep; reading parses the markdown, its YAML frontmatter and its tags.
What you get
- search_notes — a ripgrep pattern run across the vault, returning each note's path with its matching lines and surrounding context
- Extra ripgrep flags passed straight through, so case-sensitive, whole-word and multiline searches behave as they do on the command line
- read_notes — one or more notes read and parsed, with frontmatter returned as structured metadata and Obsidian tags extracted separately
Requirements
The Deno runtime, the ripgrep binary on your PATH, and the path to your vault set in the environment before the server starts. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.
Setup effort
Build from source — git clone https://github.com/boazy/notes-mcp.git
USE CASES
01
Finding what you already wrote about something
Search the vault for the term, then read the notes that came back without opening the app.
02
Bringing a note into the conversation
Read it by path and get the body, its frontmatter fields and its tags as separate things.
03
Pulling everything tagged a certain way
Match the tag with a pattern, then read the notes it found in one call.
04
Checking whether a decision was ever written down
Search with context lines around each hit, so a passing mention is distinguishable from the place it was actually decided.
2 tools
Listed in project docs. Your client may show a different list.
read_notesBEFORE YOU INSTALL
What to know first
Tools you get
2 tools named in the project's documentation.
Requires
- Deno
- ripgrep (rg) on PATH
- mise on PATH
Where it runs
The documented client runs the server on your machine.
INSTALLATION
Connect your client
Server setup
TERMINAL
git clone https://github.com/boazy/notes-mcp.git
cd notes-mcp
export OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH="<YOUR_OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH>"
deno task startMCP Clients
Claude Desktop
CLAUDE DESKTOP · JSON
{
"mcpServers": {
"notes": {
"command": "<YOUR_PATH_TO_NOTES_MCP>/start-server.sh",
"env": {
"OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH": "<YOUR_OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH>"
}
}
}
}start-server.sh ships in your clone; it changes to the project folder and runs mise run start, so this route needs mise installed as well as Deno and ripgrep. <YOUR_PATH_TO_NOTES_MCP> is the absolute path of your clone, and <YOUR_OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH> is the absolute path of your vault. Restart Claude Desktop.
