Build from source

You only need this path if you want to modify the server. Normal users install from npm via Quick start.

Setup

git clone https://github.com/sweir1/obsidian-brain.git
cd obsidian-brain
npm install
npm run build
VAULT_PATH="$HOME/path/to/vault" node dist/cli/index.js server

Point your MCP client at /absolute/path/to/obsidian-brain/dist/cli/index.js with arg server if you want to test a local build.

Repo layout

Key directories under src/:

obsidian-brain/
├── src/
│   ├── server.ts              # MCP server bootstrap
│   ├── cli/index.ts           # `obsidian-brain` CLI
│   ├── config.ts              # env parsing
│   ├── tools/                 # one file per MCP tool
│   ├── store/                 # SQLite schema + CRUD
│   ├── embeddings/            # Xenova model wrapper
│   ├── graph/                 # graphology + analytics
│   ├── vault/                 # read/write/edit .md files
│   ├── search/                # semantic + FTS
│   ├── resolve/               # fuzzy note-name matching
│   └── pipeline/              # indexing orchestrator
├── test/                      # vitest
├── scripts/                   # smoke tests + dev helpers
└── dist/                      # tsc output (gitignored)

Common commands

Command	What it does
npm run build	Compile TypeScript to dist/.
npm test	Run vitest unit tests.
npm run smoke	End-to-end MCP smoke test against a throwaway temp vault.
npm run dev	Run the server directly via tsx (no build step — handy for iteration).
npm run preflight	Mirror the CI gate locally (gen-docs --check, gen-tools-docs --check, gen-readme-recent --check, check-plugin, check-env-vars, build, test:coverage, test:python, prefetch native-loader (dry-run), smoke, docs:build --strict, codespell).
python3 scripts/build-seed.py	Regenerate data/seed-models.json from MTEB's Python registry (zero HF API calls). Requires pip install 'mteb>=2.12,<3' once. Auto-runs at every release in release.yml; rarely needs running locally. Completes in ~5 seconds.