Reinstall plugins without losing configuration

Since obsidian doesn’t care about the integrity of the plugin files, if for some reason the files are corrupted, you have to uninstall the plugin and reinstall it, which often results in lost configurations. Of course you can manually reinstall the plugin or backup the plugin configuration, but this would be tedious for cases with a lot of potentially corrupt plugin files (e.g. sync errors).
So I’ve found a workaround for this. I used grep to search and change the “version” of each plugin’s manifest.json to 0. Restart obsidian again, check for plugin updates, then all the plugins will be reinstalled.

I have a regular expression to do this, but it’s not fully tested.

(?<="version":).+"

Replace with
“0”

3 Likes

A good workaround, well done.

1 point I find you are a bit harsh about:

It is not that Obsidian does not care (you mean the devs), it is that they are not even in a position to care. Plug-in development, apart from the integrated plug-ins, is NOT their mission, their mission is to develop Obsidian, while the plug-in developers’ mission is to develop plug-ins, and as such integrity of their products is THEIR responsibility only.

If there are interfacing issues with Obsidian they need to discuss and resolve them with the Obs devs.

The integrity of the intergated plug-ins IS the responsibility of the Obs devs.

I didn’t actually ask the developers to implement this, in fact the plugin management of obsidian looks similar to other software to me (e.g. anki, vscode, etc.), so I can easily accept this. I’m just describing a situation where there is a potential corruption of a plugin file, and since obsidian is a cross-platform software and has a very active plugin community, I can imagine that this kind of plugin corruption would be more likely to occur than in other software.

This is actually incorrect, file corruption is a widespread problem that can be caused by a variety of reasons (for example, a sudden power failure or a BSOD can cause data loss, link) and can occur on any file. There is actually no way to guarantee that no data will be lost :smile:, and the same goes for plugin developers. I’m just proposing a remedy for this situation.

@Hxppdv: I did not dispute any of your file corruption comments because I know it happens. I just questioned your statement that the devs “don’t care about the integrity of the plugin files” - your words. You were referring to 3rd party plug-ins, not to plug-ins that are integrated in Obs.

Nor did I say you asked the devs to implement anything, you just mentioned a workaround for Obs users, and I congratulated you on that.

we all love Obsidian, but we all get annoyed if simple things like discussed by the OP are missing but could be part of the original package. (just to add mine, i will never understand why batch process notes is missing)
The issue is another: sometimes the hours in front of our computer never end, and your work is not done. Or get corrupt for some crazy issue. That is true tragedy - Nobody attacks anybody.
Anyway, the OP provided a solution as well :slight_smile: