Guide

Introduction

obs2nlm is a simple command line tool designed to turn an Obsidian vault into a single Markdown file that can be uploaded to Google's NotebookLM (or presumably used with other LLM tools for similar purposes).

It's probably fair to say that it's "opinionated" in that I wrote this to serve my specific purpose; but where possible I've attempted to make it generic and configurable.

Installing

obs2nlm is a Python application and is distributed via PyPI. It can be installed with tools such as pipx:

pipx install obs2nlm

or uv:

uv tool install obs2nlm

Also, if you do have uv installed, you can simply use uvx:

uvx obs2nlm

to run obs2nlm.

Command line options

The command is called obs2nlm and all command line options can be found with:

obs2nlm --help

giving output like this:

usage: obs2nlm [-h] [-a ADDITIONAL_INSTRUCTIONS] --vault VAULT
               [--source SOURCE] [-v]

Turn an Obsidian vault into a NotebookLM source

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -a, --additional-instructions ADDITIONAL_INSTRUCTIONS
                        Additional instructions to pass on to NotebookLM at
                        the top of the source
  --vault VAULT         The name of or the path to the source vault
  --source SOURCE       The path to the file to create as the source for
                        NotebookLM
  -v, --version         Show version information

v1.0.0

The key options are:

--vault

This tells obs2nlm which Obsidian vault you want to convert. This can either be a path to the root directory of a vault, or simply the name of a vault.

Note

Currently, if you pass just the name of a vault, it will look for that vault in ~/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents -- this is where my vaults live because I use Obsidian on macOS and sync with iCloud. If I figure out what other possible default locations are for other platforms and sync methods, I will extend this.

---source

This tells obs2nlm the name of the source file to create (the name of the file that you will use as a source for NotebookLM). If --source isn't supplied then the name of the vault plus an .md extension is assumed.

Important

obs2nlm will always overwrite the source; think carefully before siumply using the default name.

-a, --additional-instructions

This switch lets you provide some optional additional instructions to include at the top of the generated file. By default obs2nlm adds some instructions for the LLM to help and encourage it to "comprehend" the content of the file; using this switch you can add instructions specific to the vault you're generating the file for.

Note

This switch serves two purposes: if the value passed to the switch matches the name of a file in your filesystem, the content of that file will be read and used; otherwise the value given to the switch will be used.

Examples

Create a NotebookLM source from a vault named "Observations":

obs2nlm --vault Observations

This will read Observations vault from the default vault location, and will create Observations.md in the current working directory.

On the other hand, if you wanted to create the notebook source in a different location and with a different name:

obs2nlm --vault Observations --source ~/sources/obs.md

To add a simple additional instruction when creating the output:

obs2nlm --vault Observations --additional-instructions "Always be sarcastric when you reply to me"

or to do the same but pull the additional instruction from a file:

obs2nlm --vault Observations --additional-instructions ~/.llm/rules.md

Getting help

If you need some help using obs2nlm, or have ideas for improvements, please feel free to drop by the discussions and ask or suggest. If you believe you've found a bug please feel free to raise an issue.