Is there are REST API available?

Developers: Plugin & API
1

Hi there,

I am reaching out from Pipedream, which is an integration platform.

We continuously have been getting request to onboard Obsidian into the available applications for integration, such as this ones:

Wondering if there is a REST API available to connect Obsidian to third party applications?

Thank you,
Sergio

2

Obsidian is a local first application, there is no API you could use.
There is also no API for Obsidian Sync, due to how the encryption is implemented.

3

What is different about Pipedream and Pieces for Developers or Zotero WRT accessing Obsidian?

4

For Pieces/Zotero there is an Obsidian plugin that PULL’s the information out of the respective apps.

For Pipedream there would need to be a way to PUSH information into Obsidian.

5

I get the concept of an API. But what is being pushed to Obsidian that can’t function in the same manor as Pieces or Zotero?

6

Once again, there are plugins for Obsidian that PULL information out of Zotero/Pieces, there is nothing in either application that pushes to Obsidian.
Also, both are local applications, so they could push information into Obsidian if they wanted to. (but they don’t)

Pipedream is a web-service and is hosted on an external server, outside the local network.
Obsidian is an application that is installed on your computer, there is no way for pipedream to push information to Obsidian.
If it were possible, it would be a security nightmare.

You could write a plugin that pulls information from a web service, which pipedream would push the information to, but you can’t push information into Obsidian directly from a web service (which is what the original question is)

7

@pipedreamdev , Just a little addition to this is that since Obsidian is based upon a pure file structure for storing, it’s possible to add/change files outside of Obsidian. These changes/additions will be picked up by Obsidian the next time it runs.

In other words, if pipedreams has another way to push files to the local file system which happens to be an Obsidian vault, Obsidian will include/index those files as part of the vault.

8

If you used a sync service like Dropbox, you could give a third party service access to a specific file or folder in your archive and it could read/write stuff there. I expect Dropbox has an API you could use for this end.