ObsidianKi

Automated flashcard generation to Anki from your Obsidian vault.

Installation

# uv
uv tool install obsidianki
# uv (source)
uv tool install https://github.com/ccmdi/obsidianki.git

# pip
pip install obsidianki
# pip (source)
pip install https://github.com/ccmdi/obsidianki.git

Why?

Obsidian is a knowledge store. You write notes without the explicit intention of reviewing them later. The knowledge in Obsidian is unstructured (natural language), and forcing flashcard review into Obsidian via manual question/answer pairs is making it something it fundamentally isn't.

Anki, on the other hand, is an application exactly for purposeful review. Anki is inherently structured via "question/answer" flashcard format.

To get the best of both worlds, knowledge management in Obsidian and review scheduling in Anki, we need to translate the unstructured notes to structured flashcards. Bridging this gap is the main goal of ObsidianKi.

Setup

Run:

obsidianki

This will start the interactive setup. Here's what you'll need:

1. Obsidian access (pick one in setup):

   • Obsidian CLI (Obsidian 1.12+): enable Command line interface in Settings → General and register the CLI.
   • Local REST API: install the plugin and copy the API key from its settings.

2. AnkiConnect setup:

   • Add-on code: 2055492159
   • Keep Anki running

The interactive setup will guide you through model selection and configuration.

Usage

oki                                # Generate from random old notes
oki --notes "React"                # Generate from specific note
oki --notes "frontend/*:3"         # Sample 3 notes from folder
oki -q "What is X?"                # Standalone query (no source note)
oki --notes "React" -q "hooks"     # Targeted extraction from note

See the reference for all commands and options.

Index

• How it works

• Vector deduplication - best deduplication method

• MCP server - for conversational use

• Environment variables - optional .env settings for Obsidian

• Reference - cli usage

Configuration options