Agentic Resource Discovery Server plugin for Obsidian

Canonical version: Agentic Resource Discovery Server plugin for Obsidian.

Obsidian community plugin that turns your vault into a local-first Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) publisher and Agent Registry. It scans your AI Skills, builds a rich ai-catalog.json, and runs a localhost server so AI agents on your machine can discover and fetch exactly the skill they need by natural-language search, without those skills ever leaving your computer.

Created by Sébastien Dubois. Licensed under MIT.

This one is for people who have piled up dozens or hundreds of AI Skills and MCP servers and don't want to load all of them into every agent's context window. Instead of registering everything everywhere, you publish them to a local catalog and let agents search it.

How It Works

• Scans your skill folders (Anthropic Agent Skill format — SKILL.md plus frontmatter) at startup, without blocking Obsidian
• Turns each skill into a catalog entry: description, tags, capabilities, and synthesized example queries
• Serves an ARD registry over http://127.0.0.1 with a required bearer token
• Folders may live outside the vault — you point it at wherever your skills already are
• isDesktopOnly: the plugin needs Node's HTTP server and filesystem access

Endpoints

• GET /.well-known/ai-catalog.json — the public catalog (no auth)
• POST /search — natural-language search, results ranked 0–100 by relevance
• GET /agents — deterministic, paginated listing
• GET /skills/<name>/SKILL.md — fetch a skill's body and bundled assets directly
• POST /mcp — Model Context Protocol (MCP) endpoint using the Code Mode pattern

MCP Code Mode

The MCP endpoint exposes three tools: search, get_skill, and execute. execute runs sandboxed JavaScript against the catalog, so an agent can filter and aggregate in a single call instead of round-tripping. The sandbox has no network or filesystem access.

Search Backends

• Default: in-process BM25 index (MiniSearch). No model, no network, nothing to download.
• Optional: point it at a local embedding server you already run (Ollama, LM Studio, …) for hybrid semantic search. Nothing is bundled or downloaded by the plugin, and it falls back to lexical search if the server is down.

Privacy & Security

• Server binds to 127.0.0.1 only
• Every endpoint except the public catalog requires a bearer token
• Skill file serving is confined to your configured folders (path-traversal-safe)
• The execute sandbox has no network or filesystem access
• No telemetry, no cloud

Status

Early but functional. The REST registry, skill scanning and enrichment, skill file serving, the MCP Code Mode endpoint, and optional semantic search all work and are covered by 200+ tests. Not in the community catalog yet — install manually for now (build with bun install && bun run build, then copy manifest.json, main.js, and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/agentic-resource-discovery-server/).

Quick Start

1. Open the plugin settings
2. Under Skill folders, add folders that contain skills (each skill is a subfolder with a SKILL.md)
3. Click Rescan skills now — the status line shows how many skills were indexed
4. Copy the bearer token from the Server section
5. Point an agent at the registry (default port 27182):

# Public catalog needs no auth:
curl http://127.0.0.1:27182/.well-known/ai-catalog.json

# Search needs the bearer token:
curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:27182/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <your-token>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query":{"text":"summarize a long note"}}'

To use it as an MCP server, point your MCP client at http://127.0.0.1:27182/mcp with the bearer token.

References

• Community: https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/agentic-resource-discovery-server
• Documentation: https://dsebastien.github.io/obsidian-agentic-resource-discovery-server/
• Source code: https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-agentic-resource-discovery-server
• Agentic Resource Discovery: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org

Related

• Obsidian CLI REST MCP plugin for Obsidian
• Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• AI Agents
• Obsidian Starter Kit
• Obsidian

About Sébastien

I'm Sébastien Dubois, and I'm on a mission to help knowledge workers escape information overload. After 20+ years in IT and seeing too many brilliant minds drowning in digital chaos, I've decided to help people build systems that actually work. Through the Knowii Community, my courses, products & services and my Website/Newsletter, I share practical and battle-tested systems.

I write about Knowledge Work, Personal Knowledge Management, Note-taking, Lifelong Learning, Personal Organization, Productivity, and more. I also craft lovely digital products and tools.

If you want to follow my work, then become a member and join our community.

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