TACOS: Ted's AI Chatbot & Obsidian Sync

A self-hosted backend that powers tedawf.com with real-time content sync from Obsidian and a RAG-powered AI chatbot.

🚀 Features

• Auto-sync from Obsidian: Blog posts and personal notes update instantly via Obsidian LiveSync
• AI Chatbot: Answers questions about my portfolio content using RAG
• Content API: Serves blog posts and images directly from CouchDB
• Vector Search: Semantic search with Postgres + pgvector
• Self-hosted: Runs on my proxmox homelab

🏗️ How It Works

graph TB
    A[Obsidian] -->|LiveSync| B[CouchDB]
    B -->|_changes| C[FastAPI]
    C -->|Embeddings| D[Postgres+pgvector]

    E[Users] -->|Chat| F[Portfolio Site]
    F -->|/prompt| C
    C -->|RAG| D
    C -->|Stream response| F
    F -->|Answer| E

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In Other Words

1. Write in Obsidian - I create blog posts and notes in my Obsidian vault
2. Auto-sync to CouchDB - LiveSync plugin pushes changes instantly
3. FastAPI processes changes - Listens for _changes and ingests new content
4. Embeddings generated - OpenAI text embeddings for semantic search
5. Store in Postgres - Free vector database with pgvector extension
6. Chatbot queries - When you ask a question, it finds similar content and ranks them
7. Chatbot responds - Uses retrieved context to answer specifically about my work

Data Sources

• Blog Posts (blog/ in Obsidian)
• Personal KB (kb/ in Obsidian)
• Portfolio Content (via /update API)

🛠️ Quick Setup

Prerequisites

• Python 3.11+
• CouchDB 3.x
• Postgres 13+ with pgvector
• Obsidian + LiveSync plugin

1. Environment

Copy .env.example to .env key vars are:

COUCHDB_HOST=localhost
COUCHDB_DATABASE=obsidian_db
POSTGRES_HOST=localhost
POSTGRES_DATABASE=tacos_db
TACOS_API_KEY=your_custom_key
OPENAI_API_KEY=your_openai_key

2. Databases

CouchDB installation

https://docs.couchdb.org/en/stable/install/unix.html

Postgres + pgvector

CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS vector;
alembic upgrade head

3. Obsidian Sync

1. Install LiveSync plugin from the Obsidian community plugins marketplace
2. Connect to CouchDB
3. It will sync everything in your vault to CouchDB

4. Run

# using venv
pip install -r requirements.txt
uvicorn app.main:app --reload

🎯 Works On My Machine

For a self-hosting setup, I use:

• Nginx + certbot for reverse proxy and https
• Cloudflare for domain
• Proxmox + LXC (ubuntu)

⚡️ API Highlights

• GET /posts - List blog posts
• GET /posts/{slug} - Get post content
• GET /images/{image} - Get images (like a permalink)
• POST /prompt - Chat with AI (streaming)
• GET /query - Semantic search (for debug)
• POST /reingest - Refresh all blog and kb content
• POST /update - Gets portfolio content

🔗 Learn More

Check out the blog post for the full dev journey and lessons learned.

🔥 See it live in action: tedawf.com
📚 Check out the docs: OpenAPI Docs

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Feel free to fork or open an issue/PR!