CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Copilot for Obsidian

First off, thank you for considering contributing to Copilot for Obsidian! It's people like you who make Copilot for Obsidian such a great tool!

How Can I Contribute?

Reporting Bugs or Suggesting Enhancements

Before submitting a bug report or suggestion, please check the issues page for a list of currently known issues to ensure the bug has not already been reported. If it's a new bug or suggestion, create an issue and provide the following information:

• Use a clear and descriptive title.
• Describe the exact steps which reproduce the problem in as much detail as possible.
• Provide specific examples to demonstrate these steps.
• Describe the behavior you observed after following the steps, pointing out what exactly is the problem.
• Explain which behavior you expected to see instead and why.
• Include screenshots or animated GIFs showing you following the described steps and clearly demonstrating the problem.

Your First Code Contribution

Unsure where to begin contributing to Copilot for Obsidian? You can start by looking through the help-wanted issues.

Pull Requests

The process described here aims to:

• Maintain the quality of Copilot for Obsidian.
• Fix problems that are important to users.
• Engage the community in working towards the best possible Copilot for Obsidian.
• Enable a sustainable system for Copilot for Obsidian's maintainers to review contributions.

Please follow these steps to have your contribution considered by the maintainers:

1. Ensure the code adheres to a clean style consistent with the existing code.
2. Thoroughly test your changes before submitting.
3. Be descriptive in your pull request, linking to the issue it addresses, and showing screenshots demonstrating the change.
4. Once you receive feedback, update the code accordingly to address them before your pull request can be ultimately accepted.

How to Set Up Dev Environment

Here is a great writeup by Daniel Haven on the best practices for setting up your dev environment for Obsidian plugins.

In the case of Copilot for Obsidian, you will need to:

1. Fork the repo.
2. Create a vault just for development.
3. Clone the forked repo into your vault's plugins folder.
4. Run npm install to install all dependencies.
5. Install the recommended VS Code extensions (Prettier and ESLint).
6. Ensure your editor respects the .editorconfig and Prettier settings.
7. Run npm run dev in your repo to see the effect of your changes.
8. Before committing, run npm run format to ensure all files are properly formatted.
9. When you are ready to make a pull request, ensure to make your changes in a branch on your fork, and then submit a pull request to the main repo.

Try to be descriptive in your branch names and pull requests. Happy coding!

Fast Iteration with npm run test:vault (macOS)

If you work across multiple worktrees or just want one command to build and load the plugin into a test vault, use npm run test:vault. It runs npm install, builds, symlinks main.js / manifest.json / styles.css from the worktree into the vault's .obsidian/plugins/copilot/ folder, and reloads the plugin in Obsidian via its CLI.

One-time setup:

1. Create or pick a vault dedicated to plugin testing and open it in Obsidian at least once so .obsidian/ is created.

2. Enable community plugins in that vault (Settings → Community plugins → Turn on).

3. Set an env var pointing at the vault path. Add this to ~/.zshrc, ~/.bashrc, or ~/.config/fish/config.fish:

   export COPILOT_TEST_VAULT_PATH="$HOME/Obsidian/CopilotTestVault"

Per change:

From any worktree, run:

npm run test:vault

The script installs deps, builds the plugin, symlinks the build artifacts into the vault, then calls plugin:enable and plugin:reload on the Obsidian CLI. If Obsidian isn't running, the symlinks are still in place — start Obsidian and the new build will load.

Because the script symlinks files (not the worktree root), the vault's plugin data.json (settings, chat history) stays vault-local and is preserved across worktrees and rebuilds.

Requires macOS with Obsidian installed at /Applications/Obsidian.app.

Commit Signing

Commits to master must be signed and verified by GitHub. The easiest path is SSH signing using your existing SSH key.

1. Configure git to sign with your SSH key:

   git config --global gpg.format ssh
   git config --global user.signingkey ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
   git config --global commit.gpgsign true

   Replace id_ed25519.pub with the path to your own public key if different.

2. Register the same key as a Signing Key on GitHub at https://github.com/settings/ssh/new. Set "Key type" to Signing Key (this is separate from an Authentication Key, even if it's the same key).

3. Confirm your commit email matches a verified email on your GitHub account at https://github.com/settings/emails. Otherwise commits show as Unverified even when signed.

4. Verify locally and on GitHub:

   git commit --allow-empty -m "test signing"
   git log --show-signature -1

   After pushing, the commit on github.com should display a green Verified badge.

If you already use GPG, set gpg.format openpgp instead and register the GPG public key at https://github.com/settings/gpg/new. Commits merged via the GitHub web UI are auto-signed by GitHub and don't need this setup.

Prompt Testing

If you are making prompt changes, make sure to run the integration tests using the following steps:

First creating a .env.test file in the root directory with your Gemini API keys

GEMINI_API_KEY=your_api_key_here

Then run the integration tests:

npm run test:integration

Manual Testing Checklist

This is a list of items to manually test after any non-trivial code change. Test the items relevant to your code change. If not sure, randomly choose items below.

First, turn on debug mode in settings, and open the dev console.

The most basic ones are model changes and mode changes.

Test Fresh Install

• To ensure any new users can use the plugin on a fresh install, manually delete the data.json file in the plugin directory, disable the plugin in Obsidian, and re-enable it, enter the OpenAI API key and other API key(s) to see if onboarding is working.

Chat / Plus mode

• Switch the model and check if the log has the new model key
• Test model selection: Ask the model "what company trained you" to double check. Models from OpenAI, Claude, Gemini models can properly answer this question.
• Test chat memory: Tell the model your name, and in a turn or two ask "what's my name" to ensure chat memory is working.
• Use [[note title]] in chat and see if the model can access the content.

Vault QA / Plus mode (with a small test vault)

• Use the "Refresh index" button and see if it properly starts indexing. If it says "index is up-to-date", use "Clear Copilot index" and start indexing again (or equivalently, use "force re-index" command).
• Check if there's any error or warning during indexing in the console, and if the exclusions and inclusions are shown correctly in the notice banner. Click pause and resume.
• After indexing is successful, ask a specific question where the answer is in your docs. For example, two of my docs are a biography of a person named "Mike", I ask "who is mike" and it should be able to answer using the two docs.
  • In Plus mode make sure you trigger this query with @vault or cmd/ctrl + shift + enter. And then check "Show Sources" button for the expected docs.
• To debug any failed QA query, we need to understand if it failed at 1. indexing 2. retrieval 3. generation.
  • First use "list all indexed files" command to check if the docs are indexed correctly.
  • Then check the console log for "retrieved chunks" from the hybrid retriever.
  • If correctly retrieved, it means the Chat Model is too weak to process the context effectively. Use a stronger Chat Model

Plus mode

• "Give me a recap of this week" or some other time-based query. If you have daily notes or modified notes in this period, it should be able to retrieve them.
• Pass an image with text and ask gpt-4o-mini or gemini flash to describe the image.
• Try some random @ tool and see if it's working as expected.
• Use + or [[]] to add notes to context. Ask the AI to summarize.
• Paste a URL and ask the AI to summarize.

Settings

• If you updated model logic, test adding/deleting a custom model, whether you can use a new model in chat correctly.
• Switch the embedding model and click "refresh index" to see if it starts from scratch (it should detect that the existing index has a different type of embedding, and hence start indexing from scratch).
• Any behaviors related to the settings that you added, updated or may have affected.

Copilot Commands

• Select text in a note and apply a built-in one like "translation" or a custom one you have as Custom Prompts.
• Any commands that you added, updated or may have affected.
• Try the / custom prompt
• Whether custom prompt templating works correctly with {folder}, {#tag1, #tag2}, etc.

Getting Help

• Discord: Join the server for Copilot dev discussions.
• Email: logan@brevilabs.com

Thank you for contributing to Copilot for Obsidian!