Rootr Sync (for Obsidian)

Keep working in Obsidian, exactly as you do today. Rootr Sync pushes just the folder (or tagged notes) your team needs to collaborate on — or wants to feed to Claude/ChatGPT — into your team's Rootr workspace. Everything else in your vault stays local and private, untouched.

What this plugin does

• One-directional sync only (v1): vault → Rootr. Rootr never writes back into your vault. Your local notes are always the source of truth.
• Preserves your folder structure 1:1 — a file at Team/Project/notes/idea.md in your vault becomes /Team/Project/notes/idea.md in Rootr.
• Only touches the folder and/or tag you configure. Every other note in your vault is left completely alone.
• Writes are conflict-safe. Before each write the plugin re-reads the document from Rootr and compares it against what it left there last time. If someone changed it in Rootr in the meantime, the push is refused and the file is listed as a conflict in the status panel — never force-overwritten. The write itself additionally carries an If-Match ETag so a simultaneous edit is rejected server-side (HTTP 412) too.
• The plugin also refuses to overwrite a document that already exists at the target path but was never pushed by this plugin — rename or remove it in Rootr first. That way a first-time push can't silently replace someone else's work.

What you need

A Rootr account and a workspace you can write to (rootr.io — the free plan is enough to try this; paid plans exist for larger teams and storage). This plugin is a client for that service; it does nothing on its own.

Privacy, up front

• Only the scope you configure ever leaves your machine. The plugin sends Rootr nothing but the notes inside the single folder path and/or tag you type into its settings. To work out which notes those are, it does what any Obsidian plugin must do locally: it asks Obsidian for the vault's markdown file list and, if you set a tag filter, reads Obsidian's own in-memory metadata cache for those files. That matching happens entirely on your machine — the contents of out-of-scope notes are never read from disk and never transmitted.
• Nothing is sent in the background, except when you say so. Data leaves your machine only when you run the "Rootr Sync: Push selected folder now" command yourself, or — if you've explicitly turned on auto-sync on save — when you save a file that's inside the folder/tag you configured. There is no polling, no scheduled sync, and no sync of anything outside that scope.
• Rootr does not use this content to train AI models. Content pushed by this plugin is stored in your team's Rootr workspace for your team's own use (including your own use of Claude/ChatGPT against it, if you choose) and is not used by Rootr to train any AI model.
• This plugin ships with zero telemetry. No analytics, no usage tracking, no crash reporting, no phone-home of any kind — as required for Obsidian community plugin review.
• Your API key stays on your machine, in plain text. Obsidian plugins have no OS keychain access, so the key you paste is stored unencrypted in .obsidian/plugins/rootr-sync/data.json inside your vault — the same place every other Obsidian plugin keeps its settings. Keep that in mind if your vault is itself synced or backed up somewhere shared, and prefer a workspace-scoped key you can revoke.
• Privacy policy and terms. Data pushed by this plugin is handled under Rootr's privacy policy and terms of service.
• Deleting synced data. You can delete a synced document or folder directly in Rootr at any time. To fully cut off this plugin's access, revoke its API key in Rootr under Settings → Integrations — once revoked, no further reads or writes are possible with that key.

Setup

No Rootr workspace yet? https://rootr.io/obsidian walks through creating one and shows where to copy the two values this plugin asks for. The settings screen links there too.

1. In Rootr, go to Settings → Integrations and create an API key with docs:read and docs:write scopes for the workspace you want to sync into.

2. In Obsidian, open Settings → Rootr Sync and fill in:

   • API key (the key from step 1)
   • Workspace ID
   • Folder to sync and/or Tag to sync — at least one is required
   • Auto-sync on save (optional, off by default)
   • Rootr base URL lives under Advanced and only needs changing if you run Rootr on your own server.

   Press Check connection to confirm the key and workspace ID work before pushing anything — it reports back the workspace name.

3. Run the command "Rootr Sync: Push selected folder now" (via the command palette) to do your first push, or just save a matching file if auto-sync is on.

4. Check the Status section at the bottom of the settings tab for the last sync time, how many files pushed successfully, and any failed/conflicted files.

v1 limitations

• One-directional only. Changes made in Rootr are not pulled back into Obsidian. If you need bidirectional sync, that's on the roadmap for a future version, not v1.
• No wikilink conversion yet. [[Obsidian wikilinks]] are pushed as literal markdown text; they are not rewritten into Rootr-native links in v1.
• Folder/tag scoping is coarse. v1 supports a single folder path and a single tag filter (used as OR, if both are set) — no nested include/ exclude rules yet.
• Renames and deletions are not propagated. Renaming or deleting a note locally leaves the previously pushed copy in Rootr; remove it there by hand.
• Conflicts must be resolved manually. On a conflict, re-run the push after reconciling — there's no merge UI in v1.

Development

npm install
npm run typecheck   # type-check only, no output file
npm run build        # type-check + produce main.js via esbuild

main.js is a build artifact and is intentionally not committed to this repository — for community plugin distribution it is built and attached to a GitHub release, per Obsidian's submission requirements.

Who maintains this

Rootr Sync is built and maintained by Inspirio Inc., the team behind Rootr. This repository hosts the plugin distribution for the Obsidian community directory; issues and pull requests here are handled by the same team.

• Product: https://rootr.io
• Privacy policy: https://rootr.io/en/legal/privacy
• Contact: info@inspirio.co