Starter Packs

Share your favorite Obsidian plugins and themes as a starter pack — a named, curated list you can send to anyone as a link or a short code, the way Bluesky starter packs or mod packs work.

Good fits: creators sharing a recommended setup with their audience, teams onboarding a new vault, or anyone helping a friend get started with Obsidian.

Sharing

1. Open Starter packs (ribbon icon or command palette).
2. New pack — name it, put your name on it, and tick the plugins (and community themes) from your vault you want to include. A pack can be plugins, themes, or both.
   • Annotate each plugin (optional): add your own short comment — one per plugin. The plugin's name and description come from its manifest.json automatically, so you don't retype them. You can also set an enable flag per plugin (defaults to whether you have it enabled; overridable). Your comment shows on import and in the exported markdown; the enable flag is informational (see Receiving).
3. Share — copy any of:
   • Link — obsidian://starter-packs?d=… — opens straight into an import preview for anyone with this plugin installed.
   • Code — OSP1:… — paste-able anywhere, survives forums that mangle links.
   • Markdown — a readable list (every plugin linked to its community page) with the link and code included, ready for a forum post or note. Toggle plugin names as headings and include comments & descriptions to control how rich it is.

You can also Export as note — write the pack into your vault as a readable note (every plugin linked, with the import link and code embedded), handy for keeping a copy or posting it somewhere.

Packs are self-contained: the link/code carries the pack name, your name, and each plugin's name and author, so recipients see a full preview even before installing anything.

Receiving

• Click a starter-pack link (Obsidian opens the preview), or run Import a starter pack and paste a link or code.
• The preview shows what's in the pack and what you already have, split into Plugins and Themes. Install items one at a time, or Install all missing — plugins and themes install one after another (spaced out to stay friendly with GitHub's rate limits), with a progress bar in the modal and a notification that keeps counting even if you close the window, so you know exactly when everything is ready.
• For themes, each row also offers Apply once it's installed (Obsidian uses one active theme at a time).
• Each plugin shows the author's optional comment plus the plugin's own description (from the community catalog), and an "author: off" marker if the author keeps it disabled — the enable flag is informational only, it never auto-enables anything on your side.
• Plugins are installed disabled by default, so nothing runs until you say so. Review the pack, then use Enable all (or the per-plugin Enable) to turn them on — and Disable all to turn them back off. You can flip the default to auto-enable in settings if you only ever import packs you fully trust.
• Imported packs are kept under Shared with me so you can come back to them later, or Save as mine to edit and re-share.

Only import packs from people you trust — community plugins run with full access to your vault. Direct install can be turned off in settings, in which case installs go through Obsidian's own community-browser pages.

Notes

• Archiving a pack never breaks links you've already shared — they carry their own copy of the list.
• Plugins and themes not in their community catalog (e.g. beta plugins) are shown and flagged, but can't be auto-installed.
• CSS snippets aren't included in packs: unlike plugins and themes they have no community store to install from, so there's nothing to link to. They're on the roadmap for a future vault-replication feature that would bundle files directly.
• Mobile: the plugin is built to work on mobile, but that path isn't tested and has no dedicated QA yet — treat mobile as best-effort for now.

A note on author names

Author names on a pack are informational, not verified — there's no identity system, so anyone can put any name on a pack. We chose to keep this simple rather than build a contributor/provenance system.

When you use Save as mine on a pack someone shared, it keeps the original author's name until you edit and save the pack — at which point it becomes yours. This is a deliberate trade-off: it preserves attribution by default, but it also means a pack you modify and re-share still carries the original author's name until you make it your own. There's no enforcement in either direction; it's on the good faith of whoever's sharing.

Limitations & security

Starter Packs shares a list of plugins and themes — nothing else travels with a pack:

• No plugin settings. Recipients get a fresh install with defaults (each plugin's data.json is not shared).
• No CSS snippets. They have no community store to install from.
• No hotkeys, appearance/theme config, or other .obsidian contents.
• Not-in-catalog items (beta/BRAT plugins, private themes) are shown but flagged as not auto-installable.

Security: community plugins run with full access to your vault, so only import packs from people you trust. Installed plugins are disabled by default — review, then Enable all. A pack itself can't run code; the risk is in the plugins it points to.

Want to replicate a whole vault (settings, snippets, hotkeys)? Starter Packs deliberately doesn't — bundling settings can leak secrets (API keys/tokens in plugin data.json) and machine-specific paths, so the reliable route is to zip your .obsidian folder yourself. The plugin gives you a ready-made, offline replication checklist (Settings → Save as note, or the "Create a vault replication checklist note" command) that walks through it safely, including how to strip secrets first. (A dedicated vault-replication plugin may cover this end-to-end later; it's intentionally out of scope here.)

Similar plugins

The "install a list of plugins" idea isn't new — a few plugins touch this space:

• Share my plugin list (Benature) — exports your plugins as a markdown list or table with per-plugin one-click install and an "Install all" command. Shares as text you embed in a note.
• Plugin Groups (Mocca101) — organizes already-installed plugins into groups for bulk enable/disable and staggered startup. Not a sharing tool.
• Extension Hub — a browser for finding and installing plugins across multiple vaults.

Where Starter Packs is different: it's built around curated, named, authored collections — the "Bluesky starter pack" framing — shared as a link or code that opens an in-app preview before anything installs:

Starter Packs is deliberately peer-to-peer: a pack is something you hand to someone, not a hosted directory or discovery feed — there's no server behind it.