Daily Bible Verse

Start each day with Scripture. This Obsidian plugin adds a daily Bible verse to your daily note as an elegant callout — with the correctly localized verse reference, an attribution line, and an optional emoji (📖 ✝️ 🕊️ …):

> [!bible] Johannes 3,16
> Also hat Gott die Welt geliebt, daß er seinen eingeborenen Sohn gab, auf daß alle,
> die an ihn glauben, nicht verloren werden, sondern das ewige Leben haben.
>
> — Luther 1912

The callout is written as plain markdown into your note: it stays readable on every device, in exports, and even if you uninstall the plugin.

Features

• Offline-first — a curated selection of 526 encouraging verses ships with the plugin in all supported translations. No API keys, no external services, works on mobile.
• 5 languages — German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, each with correctly localized book names and reference notation ("Johannes 3,16" vs. "John 3:16").
• Public-domain translations — Luther 1912, Elberfelder 1905, KJV, Darby 1890, Reina-Valera Antigua (1909), Louis Segond 1910, Diodati 1649.
• Randomness with a system — a seeded shuffled-deck algorithm guarantees no repeats until the whole pool has been used once, then reshuffles: no short-interval repeats, no yearly rotation, and fully deterministic (the same day always gets the same verse, on every device).
• Configurable pool — curated selection (filterable by themes: encouragement, comfort, hope, love, wisdom, gratitude, faith, peace — with a live verse counter), the whole Bible (~31,000 verses, one-time ~5 MB download per translation), or book presets (Psalms, New Testament, Gospels, …).
• Three ways to insert — automatic on daily-note creation, a {{bible-verse}} placeholder in your daily-note template, or manual commands.
• Re-roll — don't like today's verse? Re-roll it; the new verse stays fixed for the rest of the day.

Installation

Until the plugin is listed in the community directory:

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Create the folder <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/daily-bible-verse/ and place the three files inside.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable Daily Bible Verse under Community plugins.

Or install via BRAT with the repository polygonhunter/daily-bible-verse.

Usage

Automatic (default)

With the core Daily Notes (or Periodic Notes) plugin enabled, every newly created daily note automatically receives the verse callout. The insert position is configurable (top / after frontmatter / bottom).

Template placeholder

Put {{bible-verse}} anywhere in your daily-note template — the plugin replaces it when the note is created. This also works with Templater templates (the plugin retries for a few seconds so it wins the race against template rendering).

Commands

These IDs are a stable public contract since 1.0.0 — external tools (e.g. slash-menu plugins) can safely call them via app.commands.executeCommandById(...).

How the daily pick works

The verse pool is shuffled once with a seed (Fisher-Yates) and then consumed day by day like a deck of cards — every verse appears exactly once per cycle. When the deck is exhausted, it is reshuffled with a new seed derived from the cycle number, so the next pass has a completely different order. Everything is derived from the date and a per-vault seed: no history is stored, nothing can be corrupted by sync, and all devices agree on the verse of the day.

Re-rolls are stored per date and freeze the chosen verse for that day (old entries are pruned after 60 days).

Whole-Bible mode

Curated mode works out of the box. For whole Bible or specific books the plugin downloads the selected translation once (~4–5 MB) into the plugin folder and then works fully offline. Until the download exists, the plugin transparently falls back to the curated pool (with a notice). Downloads can be deleted again in the settings.

Translations & licensing

¹ Crown patent restrictions apply within the United Kingdom.

Verse data is sourced from the Beblia Holy-Bible-XML-Format repository at build time (npm run fetch-data). Modern copyrighted translations (Luther 2017, Schlachter 1951/2000, Hoffnung für alle, NIV, ESV, …) are deliberately not included — they must not be redistributed without a license.

The plugin code is MIT-licensed.

Compatibility notes

• Daily Notes / Periodic Notes: automatic insertion uses the folder and date format from your Daily Notes settings (via obsidian-daily-notes-interface).
• Templater: supported — see the placeholder section above.
• Mobile: fully supported (isDesktopOnly: false, no Node APIs).
• Without the Daily Notes plugin, automatic insertion stays dormant (a warning appears in the settings); all manual commands keep working.

Manual test checklist

For testing in a real vault (this repo's CI covers unit tests and the build):

1. Fresh vault → enable plugin → create today's daily note → callout appears once.
2. Re-open / re-create the note → still exactly one callout (idempotency).
3. Add {{bible-verse}} to the daily-note template → placeholder is replaced at the configured spot.
4. With Templater enabled and a template that overwrites the note → still exactly one callout after ~4 seconds.
5. Toggle themes in the settings → pool counter updates; verse changes on the next day.
6. Command "Re-roll today's verse" → callout in the open note is replaced; re-running "Insert today's verse" yields the same re-rolled verse.
7. Whole-Bible mode without download → notice + curated fallback; after "Download now" → verses from the whole Bible.
8. Switch language → book names, notation and verse text follow.
9. Mobile app: repeat steps 1 and 7.
10. Create yesterday's daily note via the calendar → it gets yesterday's verse.

Development

npm install
npm test           # vitest unit tests
npm run build      # type-check + production bundle (main.js)
npm run dev        # esbuild watch mode
npm run fetch-data # regenerate data/generated/ from the source Bibles (needs curl)
npm run validate-refs  # structural checks + pool statistics for the curated list

Architecture: everything under src/core/ is pure TypeScript (no Obsidian imports, enforced by a test) and unit-tested; the files in src/ are thin Obsidian glue. Curated verse references live in data/curated-refs.json; the verse texts are generated into data/generated/ at build time and committed.