Obsidian Headless

description: Obsidian Headless is a command line client for Obsidian services. Sync your vaults without the desktop app.
permalink: headless
aliases:
  - headless

Obsidian Headless (open beta) is a headless client for Obsidian services. It lets you sync vaults from the command line without the desktop app, with all the speed, privacy, and end-to-end encryption benefits of Obsidian Sync.

Reasons you might use Obsidian Headless:

• Automate remote backups.
• Automate publishing a website.
• Give agentic tools access to a vault without access to your full computer.
• Sync a shared team vault to a server that feeds other tools.
• Run scheduled automations e.g. aggregate daily notes into weekly summaries, auto-tag, etc.

Obsidian Headless vs Obsidian CLI

Obsidian CLI controls the Obsidian desktop app from your terminal. Obsidian Headless is a standalone client that runs independently, no desktop app required.

Install

Obsidian Headless (open beta) requires Node.js 22 or later. Install it from npm:

npm install -g obsidian-headless

Authentication

Log in

ob login

If already logged in, ob login displays your account info. To switch accounts, pass --email and/or --password to log in again.

ob login [--email <email>] [--password <password>] [--mfa <code>]

All options are interactive when omitted — email and password are prompted, and 2FA is requested automatically if enabled on the account.

To log out and clear stored credentials:

ob logout

Services

• Headless Sync: use Obsidian Sync from the command line without the desktop app.
• Headless Publish: use Obsidian Publish from the command line without the desktop app.