obsidian-to-appflowy

Move your Obsidian vault into AppFlowy in one command.

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A CLI tool for migrating Obsidian vaults into AppFlowy. It walks your vault, converts markdown to AppFlowy blocks, and uploads everything through the AppFlowy API — folders become nested pages, images get re-hosted, wikilinks become page links.

Built for one-time migrations. Your Obsidian files are never modified.

Before you start

1. Python 3.11+ — pip install obsidian-to-appflowy
2. An AppFlowy account on AppFlowy Cloud or your own deployment
3. Your vault folder — the directory you opened in Obsidian

⚠️ Run --dry-run first to preview without touching anything.

What gets migrated

Obsidian	AppFlowy
Folders	Nested pages
Headings # ## …	Heading blocks (levels 1–6)
Bullet and numbered lists (nested)	List blocks with children
Blockquotes >	Quote blocks
Fenced code blocks	Code blocks with language
Horizontal rules ---	Divider blocks
Markdown tables	simple_table blocks
bold, italic, strike, code, ==highlight==, [links]	Inline formatting
HTML inline tags <u>, <b>, <i>, <s>, <mark>, <a href>, <br>	Mapped to AppFlowy formatting (underline / bold / italic / strikethrough / highlight / link / space)
Frontmatter --- ... ---	Preserved as a YAML code block at the top
Wikilinks [[Note]] / [[Note|Alias]]	Page links (clicking navigates to the page)
![[img.png]], 	Uploaded image blocks
- [ ] / - [x] tasks	Todo blocks (checked state preserved)

Try the example vault first

Not sure what to expect? Clone the repo and run try a dry-run on the included vault — it covers every supported block type (headings, lists, tables, code, images, wikilinks, tasks…):

git clone https://github.com/vsgusev/obsidian-to-appflowy
cd obsidian-to-appflowy
obsidian-to-appflowy --vault example_vault --dry-run

Or import it to AppFlowy to see the real result before touching your own notes:

obsidian-to-appflowy --vault example_vault --url https://cloud.appflowy.io --email you@example.com

Usage

Preview locally (no account needed):

# replace ~/Documents/MyVault with the absolute path to your vault
obsidian-to-appflowy --vault ~/Documents/MyVault --dry-run

Import to AppFlowy Cloud:

# for self-hosted, swap --url for your gateway, e.g. http://192.168.1.10:8800
obsidian-to-appflowy --vault ~/Documents/MyVault --url https://cloud.appflowy.io --email you@example.com

Password is prompted if not passed via --password or $APPFLOWY_PASSWORD.

Options

Flag	Default
--vault PATH	required	Obsidian vault root
--url URL	required for import	AppFlowy API base URL
--email EMAIL	$APPFLOWY_EMAIL	Account email
--password PASS	$APPFLOWY_PASSWORD / prompt	Account password
--space NAME	Obsidian	Space name in AppFlowy
--space-color HEX	#00BCF0	Space icon color
--skip-images	off	Text-only import, no uploads
--dry-run	off	Preview without API calls

Limitations

• Tags — #tag stays as plain text
• Callouts — > [!NOTE] becomes a plain quote block
• Plugins — Dataview, Kanban, Excalidraw and other plugin syntax appear as plain text
• HTML — only inline tags listed in the migration table are mapped; block-level HTML (<details>, <table>, <iframe>, etc.) and unsupported inline tags (<sup>, <sub>, <span>) keep their content but lose styling
• Duplicate image filenames — if two images share a name, only one is used; a warning prints to stderr
• Edge cases:
  • Duplicate page names — wikilinks resolve by filename stem, so [[Note]] is ambiguous if two Note.md exist in different folders (the first one wins)
  • [[Note#Section]] and [[Note^block]] link to the page itself; the section/block target is dropped
  • YAML frontmatter with a --- line inside a value may be only partially captured
  • Fenced code indented under a list bullet is not detected as a code block

License

MIT