site2vault 0.1.1

Mirror any website into a linked Obsidian vault.

Site2Vault

Mirror any website into a linked Obsidian vault. Built for Claude Code and other agentic tools to read documentation offline at near-zero token cost.

Site2Vault crawls a website, extracts the main content of each page as clean Markdown, and wires every internal link as an Obsidian [[wikilink]]. The result is a self-contained vault you can open in Obsidian, search across, and feed to Claude Code without paying for repeated web fetches.

Video overview: Why Site2Vault exists and how it works — the pattern of a self-built wiki as the AI context layer, the six-phase pipeline, and how the manifest enables section-level reads for coding agents.

flowchart LR
    A[Seed URL] --> B[Phase 1: Crawl]
    S[Sitemap] --> B
    B --> C[Phase 1.5: Deboilerplate]
    C --> D[Phase 2: Rewrite Links]
    D --> E[Phase 2.5: Byte Offsets]
    E --> F[Phase 3: Index MOCs]
    F --> G[Phase 4: Manifest]
    G --> V[(Obsidian Vault)]

Why

Feeding documentation to an agentic coder via repeated web fetches burns tokens. A 200-page docs site can cost dollars per query. Site2Vault pulls the entire corpus once into a local Markdown vault. From then on, the agent reads files at near-zero cost, navigates by [[wikilink]] exactly as on the original site, and uses the manifest to read only the sections it needs.

As of April 2026 there are quite a few other tools that mirror sites to Markdown, but to the best of my knowledge none produce a fully interlinked Obsidian vault with a machine-readable corpus index designed for agentic consumption. That gap is what site2vault fills.

Install

Standalone Windows executable (no Python required)

Download site2vault-windows.zip from the dist folder, extract, and add the folder to your PATH.

Via pipx (isolated, recommended for end users)

Coming soon — site2vault is not yet published to PyPI. Track #1 for the first release.

pipx install site2vault

Via pip (for development or embedding)

pip install -e .

Optional JS rendering for client-side-rendered sites:

pip install 'site2vault[js]'
playwright install chromium

Obsidian plugin

If you prefer a GUI, the obsidian-site2vault plugin wraps the CLI with a modal dialog, live log view, and settings tab — all inside Obsidian.

Quick start

# Mirror a docs site into your Obsidian vault
site2vault --url docs.example.com --path C:\Obsidian\Vault --name "Example Docs"

# Capture a single page
site2vault --url example.com/page --single

# Refresh an existing vault (uses conditional GET, skips unchanged pages)
site2vault --url docs.example.com --path C:\Obsidian\Vault --name "Example Docs" --refresh

The vault that results:

Example Docs/
├── .site2vault/manifest.json    Machine-readable corpus index
├── Index.md                     Root Map of Content
├── api/
│   ├── Index.md                 Folder MOC
│   └── Endpoints.md
├── getting-started/
│   ├── Index.md
│   └── Installation.md
└── log/                         Crawler internals (SQLite, headings, link sidecars)

Example of the OpenAI site in my Obsidian vault -

Common recipes

# Full docs site with tags
site2vault --url docs.api.com --path ./vault --tag source/web --tag reference

# Restricted scope: only /api/* under the seed
site2vault --url example.com --include "^https://example\.com/api/" --depth 6

# Multiple sites in one vault, isolated by namespace
site2vault --url docs.example.com --path ./vault --namespace docs
site2vault --url blog.example.com --path ./vault --namespace blog

# Slow and polite for fragile sites
site2vault --url small-site.com --rate 0.3 --concurrency 1 --jitter 0.5

# Discovery only (no files written)
site2vault --url docs.example.com --dry-run --max-pages 100

See docs/cli-reference.md for every flag.

How it works

Six phases, orchestrated by orchestrator.py:

1. Crawl — Breadth-first frontier with politeness controls. Fetches via httpx (HTTP/2), extracts main content with trafilatura, converts to Markdown with placeholder link tokens.
2. Deboilerplate — Cross-page paragraph frequency analysis removes repeated cruft like "Edit on GitHub" footers.
3. Rewrite — Replaces placeholder tokens with [[wikilinks]] for in-vault pages or [text](url) for external links.
4. Byte offsets — Computes heading byte offsets in the final Markdown for section-level reading.
5. Index — Generates root and per-folder Maps of Content.
6. Manifest — Writes .site2vault/manifest.json with per-note metadata (headings, links, word counts, byte offsets).

For the full architecture, see docs/architecture.md.

For Claude Code

Site2Vault is designed for agentic consumption. The single most important fact:

Read .site2vault/manifest.json first. It tells you every note, every heading, every link, and every byte offset, without scanning a single Markdown file.

Then read only what you need, by section if possible:

# Find the section that covers what you need
import json
manifest = json.load(open("vault/.site2vault/manifest.json"))
for note in manifest["notes"]:
    for h in note["headings"]:
        if "authentication" in h["text"].lower():
            with open(f"vault/{note['file']}", "rb") as f:
                f.seek(h["start_byte"])
                section = f.read(h["end_byte"] - h["start_byte"]).decode()
            # done. one section, not the whole file.

Full guide: docs/claude-integration.md.

Documentation

• Architecture — pipeline phases, module map, design decisions
• CLI reference — every flag, every default
• Claude integration — how to consume vault output efficiently
• Troubleshooting — common failures and fixes
• Development — setup, testing, building

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Acknowledgments

Built on trafilatura, httpx, markdownify, and Obsidian.