1. Creating Your First Vault

Tip

In this howto guide, please take all of my "Suggested Setup" steps and "Suggested Plugins" with a grain of salt. I'm showing you what works for me. It might be a good starting place for you, but if you have different ideas, go for it!

Experiment with different settings, in a sandbox Vault.

The first time you open Obsidian after installing it, you are prompted to add a new vault to your setup.

Info

A vault is a top-level folder of your notes. It contains

  • folders and sub-folders
  • note pages stored as plain text files in CommonMark/Markdown format
  • attachments
  • hidden configuration files

In the welcome screen, click the Create button to create a new vault to be taken to the "Create local vault" screen:

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Set Location to the container folder where you keep notes or projects, or where you store files synced with your other computers. For example, you might choose:

  • $HOME (your home folder)
  • $HOME/Documents
  • NextCloud or DropBox

Vault name will be the name of the vault's folder under Location. For example, you might call it Journal, or Obsidian Journal.

When you click the second Create button, the folder "$vault_name" will be created under "$location".

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You should now be in an Obsidian window with your new empty vault with a default Welcome page in the middle, a vault navigation list ("Files") on the left, and a Graph view on the right.

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You can close the Graph view can call it back later if you want it, and you can right-click on the Welcome file in the Files list and delete it.

Before you start filling out the structure of your vault, I suggest making a few configuration changes and installing a few plugins via the "⚙" settings screen — the button is in the bottom-left corner of your Obsidian window, next to the vault name and the ? Help button.

Suggested Configuration

⚙ → Files and links → Automatically update internal links
Set to true.

⚙ → Files and links → Detect all file extensions
Set to true.

⚙ → Files and links → Default location for new attachments
Set to "In the folder specified below" and enter the following in the next field, "Attachment folder path":

`/Asset

⚙ → Core Plugins → Daily notes
Set to disabled. We're going to setup our own monthly structure that doesn't work with the Daily Notes plugin's structure.

⚙ → Community Plugins
Turn on community plugins

Suggested Plugins

In ⚙ → Community Plugins, use Browse to find and install:

  • Auto Template Trigger
  • Copy document as HTML
  • Image Converter
  • Quick Links
  • Dataview

We will go over the recommended configuration for the plugins in the following pages.