Halyard Fetch

Pull a generated artifact from a remote registry — a GitLab generic package or a GitHub release asset — unzip it, and mirror its contents into a vault folder, on a schedule or on demand.

Read-only. No git, no clone, no push, no write path back to the source. The plugin cannot modify anything outside the folder you point it at.

For the git-based sibling, see Halyard Sync, which syncs a whole vault with a git repository and deliberately excludes this use case.

AI disclaimer

This plugin was developed with substantial AI assistance (Claude).

Source types

CI-artifact sources (GitLab CI job artifacts, GitHub Actions artifacts) and plain authenticated URLs are designed for but not built — see DESIGN.md.

Installation

Community plugin directory — not yet listed; submission is pending.

BRAT (beta) — install BRAT, then "Add beta plugin" with timrs2998/halyard-fetch.

Manual — download manifest.json, main.js and styles.css from the latest release into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/halyard-fetch/, then enable it in Settings → Community plugins.

Setup

Add source — via the ribbon icon, command palette, or settings tab — opens a wizard:

1. Pick a host: GitLab or GitHub.
2. Identify the artifact: project and package, or repo and tag, plus a display name.
3. Paste a token. See Security for where it goes.
4. Test the connection, or skip it (with confirmation) if you're offline.
5. The wizard downloads the artifact once to detect its content root — the folder inside the zip that gets mirrored. It auto-fills when there's exactly one top-level folder and asks you to pick when there isn't.
6. Choose a destination folder (it must not overlap another source), how the generated content reaches other devices, and a refresh interval.
7. Confirm. The source saves and refreshes immediately.

For distribution, choose one model per source:

• Fetch here and share through Halyard Sync — one desktop or other producer fetches the artifact, then Halyard Sync commits the complete generated result for consumer devices to pull. Do not configure multiple producers for the same destination unless duplicate generation is intentional.
• Fetch independently on each device — configure the source and token on every device that needs it. The generated destination stays out of Git.

The choice is retained even when Halyard Sync is not installed. Shared mode is available once a compatible Halyard Sync is installed; an older Halyard Sync must be updated before shared mode can be enabled safely.

Editing a source reopens the same wizard, pre-filled, and revalidates on save.

Scheduling

Each source refreshes on its own interval, optionally whenever Obsidian regains focus, and once at startup to catch up after being fully quit.

Mobile has no background timer. There, "every N minutes" means "the next time you open the app after N minutes have passed since the last success" — a staleness threshold, not a timer. The first mobile launch asks whether scheduled refreshes should be restricted to Wi-Fi; "Refresh now" always bypasses that.

A freshness check runs before every download, so an unchanged source costs one small request rather than a full re-download.

Errors

A failing source shows a Notice, a badge in settings, and an entry in the log viewer (ribbon, status bar, or the "Open log" command).

Repeated identical failures don't re-notify — only transitions do, meaning the first failure after a success or a different error than last time. There's no automatic backoff: a failed source retries on its normal schedule, and "Refresh now" is always available once you've fixed whatever broke.

Security

• Tokens go to app.secretStorage (OS keychain on desktop) when available. Where it isn't, they fall back to this plugin's data.json in plaintext, and settings shows a warning saying so.
• Tokens stay on the device they were entered on. They don't travel with the vault or through Obsidian Sync.
• Use the narrowest scope your host offers (see the table above). Two sources sharing a host still get independent tokens.
• The plugin writes only under each source's own destination folder, reads only from the host, project and package you configure, and never writes back to a source.
• With Halyard Sync in the same vault, local-cache destinations are managed exclusions, while shared destinations remain ordinary syncable vault content. Shared materialization is batched so Halyard Sync sees only a completed refresh. Halyard Fetch's own data.json remains a managed exclusion in every mode because it can contain fallback tokens. If a destination was already tracked, changing its mode does not rewrite Git history; review any existing tracked snapshot manually.

Existing sources created before distribution choices were added keep their old exclusion until you explicitly review them. Settings shows a migration prompt for each source. Dismissing keeps the old behavior and warning. Choosing shared mode removes only the exact old destination pattern; broader patterns such as Sources/ remain blockers and are reported.

Limitations

• GitLab Generic Package Registry and GitHub Releases only.
• No CI-artifact or plain-URL sources yet.
• Not yet in the community plugin directory.

Development

npm install
npm run dev      # esbuild watch
npm run build    # tsc --noEmit + production esbuild
npm run lint     # eslint
npm test         # vitest
npm run test:e2e # real Obsidian, driven headlessly via WebdriverIO

Pure logic — id generation, content-root detection, mirror-diff computation, scheduling, notice dedup, retry and rate-limit handling — is unit-tested against real zip fixtures built with fflate, not mocked extraction. UI glue is verified by type-checking and building.

npm run test:e2e uses wdio-obsidian-service, which downloads a real Obsidian build (cached in .obsidian-cache/, gitignored) and drives it against the fixture vault in e2e/vaults/simple — once as desktop Obsidian, once under emulated-mobile UI. The first run is slower. Widen the version matrix with OBSIDIAN_VERSIONS (e.g. "earliest/earliest latest/latest"). GitHub Actions runs this coverage on pushes, pull requests, and release tags on Ubuntu with Xvfb and herbstluftwm; it does not test a physical iOS device.

Architecture and rationale live in DESIGN.md; contributor conventions in AGENTS.md.

Releasing

• npm version x.y.z — bumps package.json, manifest.json and versions.json together, commits, and tags x.y.z
• git push origin main --tags
• GitHub Actions builds, verifies the tag matches manifest.json, and attaches manifest.json, main.js and styles.css to the release

No v prefix on the tag — Obsidian requires it to equal manifest.json's version exactly. .npmrc's tag-version-prefix="" is what keeps npm version from adding one.

Prior art and credits

• obsidian-git (Vinzent03) — the plugin that defined git-in-Obsidian. Halyard Fetch exists because read-only artifact ingestion sits outside its scope.
• fflate (Arjun Barrett) — zip handling, pure JS with no native dependency, which is what makes mobile support possible.
• wdio-obsidian-service (Jesse Hines) — end-to-end testing against real Obsidian.
• obsidian-sample-plugin — build scaffolding conventions (esbuild.config.mjs, version-bump.mjs, versions.json).
• BRAT (TfTHacker) — the beta distribution path used above.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Third-party notices: THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.