Notes go in from anywhere and come back as cited answers, and every answer can be written back, so the vault compounds instead of staying a pile of clippings. It reads the folder structure and wikilink conventions you already use rather than imposing its own.
An MCP server that gives Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or Windsurf read and write access to an Obsidian vault, sandboxed to that directory. It ships on npm as `synapse-obsidian` and presents itself as Taproot: nine `taproot_` tools for the knowledge-base workflow and six `garden_` tools for direct file access. The vault is just a folder of markdown, so Obsidian does not need to be running.
- A guided first run that scans the vault and offers three routes — use the structure you already have, scaffold a knowledge base, or describe your own — then saves the answer (`taproot_plant`, `taproot_till`, `taproot_sow`)
- Anything saved into the vault from anywhere: hand it a URL and the page is fetched, converted to markdown and filed (`taproot_seed`)
- Raw sources turned into summaries, concept pages and entity pages, cross-linked with wikilinks — one at a time or every unprocessed source at once (`taproot_water`, `taproot_cultivate`)
- A question researched across the whole knowledge base, answered with citations (`taproot_harvest`)
- A full vault overview with suggested next actions, and a health check for broken links, orphan pages, missing frontmatter and stale content (`taproot_status`, `taproot_prune`)
- Direct file access underneath all of it: read a file, create or update one, list a directory, full-text search, count files, read a file's YAML metadata (`garden_read`, `garden_plant`, `garden_survey`, `garden_forage`, `garden_measure`, `garden_tag`)
- A `--http` mode so a browser-based client can reach a vault on your own machine through a tunnel
Node.js 18 or newer, and the path to your vault — or any folder of markdown — passed as an argument to `npx -y synapse-obsidian`. For Claude.ai or ChatGPT, run it with `--http --port 3777` and expose it through a tunnel, then add the tunnel's `/mcp` URL as a custom integration. Access is sandboxed to the vault directory and nothing outside it.
One command — npx -y synapse-obsidian /path/to/your/obsidian-vault