Vault Git

A fork of Vinzent03/obsidian-git focused on stability on mobile (iOS / Android). Bring Git into your Obsidian vault — commit, pull, push, and view diffs from inside Obsidian, with a sane default profile for phones.

Looking for the original? This is a sibling community plugin, not a replacement. The upstream obsidian-git (id: obsidian-git) is still maintained — you can install both side by side.

The upstream plugin marks mobile as ⚠️ Experimental and warns of crashes on clone/pull. The root causes are addressable without rewriting the plugin, so this fork keeps the codebase intact and applies targeted fixes:

• No more startup crash on mobile. Node-only built-ins (child_process, fs, path, os) were imported eagerly even though every call site was desktop-gated; the top-level require fired during plugin load on iOS/Android and tore the plugin down before the UI ever appeared. Vault Git routes them through a lazy Proxy so the require only fires when desktop code actually touches them.
• Shallow by default on mobile. clone and fetch default to depth: 1 + singleBranch on Platform.isMobile, keeping the on-device pack file small enough that iOS/Android Obsidian doesn't run out of memory.
• Bounded concurrency. stageAll / unstageAll previously fanned out to an unbounded Promise.all over every changed file; on mobile this OOMed for vaults with hundreds of changes. Vault Git caps in-flight git operations at 16 on mobile.
• Safer merge driver. Files larger than 2 MB now bail to a conflict instead of being split line-by-line via regex (which allocated one array entry per line on every side and was a reliable mobile crash path).
• Init isolation. Auto-pull / auto-commit failures during startup no longer unwind the whole plugin — the user can still drive Git manually if a periodic task can't be wired up.

Beyond mobile, behavior on desktop is intentionally unchanged. The feature set, settings, command palette entries, and documentation linked below all carry over.

Vault Git ships under a distinct plugin id (vault-git), distinct view types (vault-git-view, vault-git-history-view, …), a distinct workspace event namespace (vault-git:*), and a distinct CSS class prefix (vault-git-*). You can install it next to the upstream plugin in the same vault without collisions.

The setup guide, mobile notes, authentication, and advanced configuration from the upstream plugin still apply: see the 📖 full documentation.

• 🔁 Automatic commit-and-sync (commit, pull, and push) on a schedule.
• 📥 Auto-pull on Obsidian startup
• 📂 Submodule support for managing multiple repositories (desktop only and opt-in)
• 🔧 Source Control View to stage/unstage, commit and diff files — open it with the Open source control view command.
• 📜 History View for browsing commit logs and changed files — open it with the Open history view command.
• 🔍 Diff View for viewing changes in a file — open it with the Open diff view command.
• 📝 Signs in the editor to indicate added, modified, and deleted lines/hunks (desktop only).
• GitHub integration to open files and history in your browser.

Mobile is the focus of this fork, but it is still constrained by what isomorphic-git can do in a JavaScript runtime without native Git. The same API limits as upstream apply:

• No SSH authentication (isomorphic-git issue)
• No rebase merge strategy
• No submodules
• Memory still scales with repo size — a "large enough" repo will still OOM. Use shallow clones (default on mobile) and prefer staging individual files.

If you hit a clone/pull crash on mobile that isn't explained by raw repo size, please open an issue with the device, OS version, repo size, and reproduction steps.

Some Git services may require further setup for HTTPS/SSH. Refer to the Authentication Guide.

• ⚠️ Snap is not supported due to sandboxing restrictions.
• ⚠️ Flatpak is not recommended; sandbox limitations cause issues with more advanced setups.
• ✅ Use AppImage or a full-access install via your distro's package manager (installation guide).

This plugin is a fork. All credit for the design and the bulk of the implementation goes upstream:

• Original development: denolehov (2020 onward).
• Primary maintainer of the upstream plugin: Vinzent03, since March 2021. The repo moved to his account in July 2024.
• Line Authoring feature: GollyTicker.

If your question or feedback is about a feature that exists upstream too, the upstream issue tracker is usually a better venue. For Vault Git specific issues — particularly mobile crashes — please open an issue here.

MIT — see LICENSE. Copyright is held by the upstream authors; Vault Git contributors are added on top under the same MIT terms.