Obsidian Vault Indexer

Long-running service that watches the Obsidian vault and keeps a SQLite full-text search index (FTS5) of it up to date, so the carapace-obsidian plugin can search notes without reading every file. On the Mac mini it runs from the LaunchAgent com.octo.openclaw.obsidian-indexer (backed up in config/macos/launchd/).

Features

  • Watches the vault with chokidar and re-indexes files as they change
  • Parses Markdown front matter, tags and [[wikilinks]]
  • Keeps the index in a SQLite FTS5 database in WAL mode, so reads and writes can happen at the same time
  • The plugin opens the database read-only, so it never conflicts with the indexer
  • Supports prefix matching (wash finds washer and washing) and OR queries

Architecture 

┌──────────────────┐       ┌──────────────────┐       ┌────────────────┐
│ Obsidian vault   │       │ Indexer service  │       │ Plugin (r/o)   │
│ (Markdown files) │──────▶│ (chokidar watch) │──────▶│ (VaultReader)  │
│                  │ watch │ SQLite FTS5 DB   │  read │ vault tools    │
└──────────────────┘       └──────────────────┘       └────────────────┘

Vault location

The vault is ~/OneDrive/JeffBrain/, synced from the owner’s other devices by OneDrive (see OneDrive Sync).

Environment Variables

The LaunchAgent sets both:

Variable Required Description
OBSIDIAN_VAULT_ROOT yes Vault folder to watch (on the Mac mini, the JeffBrain folder in OneDrive)
OBSIDIAN_INDEX_LOCATION no Where the index database is written (default ~/.openclaw/obsidian-index.db)

Logs 

tail -f ~/Library/Logs/openclaw-obsidian-indexer.log
launchctl kickstart -k gui/$(id -u)/com.octo.openclaw.obsidian-indexer   # restart

Source

The indexer and the OpenClaw plugin are both distributed from the carapace-obsidian repo, which has the full installation and configuration details.