Obsidian Vault Dashboard

A live, local dashboard for the Obsidian vault at C:\Users\Prabhash\Documents\obsidian\prabhash-vault.

It watches the vault and updates in real time as you edit notes in Obsidian: stats, a writing-activity heatmap, tag breakdown, an interactive note graph, aggregated tasks (toggleable from the dashboard), recent notes, and a daily-note calendar. Click anything to jump straight to that note in Obsidian.

Run it

Double-click start-dashboard.bat, or:

npm install
npm run build
npm start        # http://localhost:5175

Development mode (hot reload):

npm run dev      # client on http://localhost:5173, API on :5175

Configure

config.json:

{
  "vaultPath": "C:\\path\\to\\your\\vault",
  "vaultName": "your-vault-name",
  "port": 5175
}

vaultName must match the vault name in Obsidian for the "open in Obsidian" links (obsidian:// URIs) to work.

Automation

• Project sync - the report scans each syncRoots entry in config.json; any top-level folder without a matching note anywhere in the vault gets one created from the Project template (in that root's target vault folder), with a repo: path in its frontmatter. Matching is loose ("saple-bridge" matches "Saple Bridge.md"). Folders listed in projectsExclude are skipped.

  "syncRoots": [
    { "path": "D:\\project", "folder": "Projects" },
    { "path": "C:\\Users\\Prabhash\\Documents\\code\\project", "folder": "Projects" },
    { "path": "D:\\code\\contests", "folder": "Contests" }
  ]
  

• Daily report - npm run report (or daily-report.bat) creates today's daily note from the template if missing and writes a "Vault report" section into it: git commits per project since yesterday, focus-project signals, inbox pressure, yesterday's edits, today's edits so far, and all open tasks. It also creates/refreshes the current weekly review note (Daily/Week YYYY-WW.md) with the top 3 project focus, cleanup candidates, and review prompts. Scheduled via Task Scheduler as "Obsidian Daily Report", daily at 8:00 (runs on next wake if the PC was off). Change the time in Task Scheduler, or remove with: Unregister-ScheduledTask -TaskName "Obsidian Daily Report".

• Server auto-start - obsidian-dashboard.vbs in the user Startup folder launches the server in the background at login. Delete that file to disable.

• Report sections are wrapped in <!-- vault-report:start/end --> markers; the indexer skips them so generated content never inflates vault stats.

Focus workflow

The dashboard is designed to keep the real working set to 3 active focus projects.

Choose the top 3 focus projects

Open a project note in Obsidian and edit its Properties/frontmatter:

status: active
priority: high
focus: true
next: One clear next action
blocked:
last-reviewed: 2026-07-06

Use this for projects that should not compete for attention:

status: paused
priority: low
focus: false

Rules used by the dashboard/report:

• status: active keeps a project eligible.
• status: paused, not active, inactive, done, or archived removes it from active focus.
• focus: true is the strongest top-3 signal.
• priority: high also boosts a project.
• next: should be one concrete next action; blank next: is flagged.
• blocked: should explain the blocker; any value is flagged as blocked.
• last-reviewed: older than 14 days is flagged as stale.

Daily use

1. Open the dashboard at http://localhost:5175.
2. Check the Focus strip for today, weekly review, inbox, project overload, and open tasks.
3. Use Top 3 focus to choose what to work on.
4. Use Project queue filters (Focus, No next, Stale, Blocked, Thin) to clean up project notes.
5. Write work logs in the daily note and project note.
6. Run npm run report anytime to refresh the generated daily and weekly review sections.

Weekly review

npm run report creates/refreshes Daily/Week YYYY-WW.md. Use it to decide:

• Which 3 projects are truly active next week?
• Which projects should be paused, marked not active, done, or archived?
• Which project notes need a next: action, review date, or clearer goal?
• Which Inbox notes should become projects, reference notes, or be deleted?

How it works

• server/ - Express + WebSocket. Indexes every .md file (frontmatter, tags, wikilinks, tasks, word counts) with gray-matter, watches the vault with chokidar, and broadcasts a fresh snapshot on every change. Edit history for the heatmap accumulates in server/data/activity.json.
• client/ - React + Tailwind + Recharts + d3-force, built with Vite into dist/ and served by the same server.