Obsidian Daylio Parser

Convert your Daylio journal backup (.csv) into Markdown files for Obsidian.

What it does

Daylio lets you export your journal as a .csv file. This tool reads that export and produces one .md file per day, organised into year/month/ sub-directories — ready to drop into an Obsidian vault.

Each output file contains YAML front matter and one or more journal entries:

---
tags: daylio
---

## captivated | 22:00
#at-the-office #board-game #colleague-interaction
Sed ut est interdum

## tired | 20:00 | An optional title
#allegro #at-the-office #board-game
Quisque dictum odio quis augue consectetur.

Features

• Groups multiple entries from the same day into a single .md file
• Converts activities into Obsidian-compatible #tags (slugified, lowercased, special characters stripped)
• Supports custom mood sets via a .json file for mood-group colour coding
• Supports non-Latin characters in notes and activities (Polish, Cyrillic, etc.)
• Configurable YAML front-matter tags, heading levels, and entry prefixes/suffixes

Installation

pip (recommended)

pip install obsidian-daylio-parser

There was a previous package called daylio-obsidian-parser (https://pypi.org/project/daylio-obsidian-parser/) that has been deprecated in favour of this one for consistency. If you have the old package installed, please uninstall it to avoid confusion.

From source

git clone https://github.com/DeutscheGabanna/Obsidian-Daylio-Parser.git
cd Obsidian-Daylio-Parser
pip install .

Docker

docker build -t obsidian-daylio-parser .
docker run -v /path/to/your/files:/data obsidian-daylio-parser /data/export.csv /data/output

Usage

obsidian-daylio-parser <filepath> <destination> [options]

Arguments

Argument	Description
filepath	Path to the Daylio .csv export file
destination	Output folder. Files are organised into destination/year/month/YYYY-MM-DD.md

Options

Option	Default	Description
--version		Show the installed version and exit
--force accept\|refuse	(prompt)	Accept or refuse all overwrite confirmations without asking
--front_matter_tags TAG [TAG ...]	daylio	Tags for the YAML front matter of each .md file
--prefix TEXT	(empty)	Prepend a string to each entry's header
--suffix TEXT	(empty)	Append a string to each entry's header
--tag_activities, -a	True	Convert activities into #tag format
--color	(unused)	Intended for mood colour coding — not yet implemented
--header N	2	Heading level for entries (e.g. 2 → ##, 3 → ###)
--csv-delimiter CHAR	\|	Delimiter separating activities within a single CSV cell

Examples

Basic conversion:

obsidian-daylio-parser ~/Downloads/daylio_export.csv ~/ObsidianVault/Journal

Custom front-matter tags with ### headings:

obsidian-daylio-parser export.csv ./vault --front_matter_tags journal mood-tracking --header 3

Activities as plain text (no # prefix):

obsidian-daylio-parser export.csv ./vault --tag_activities False

For example, if you have an activity in Daylio named 69 it wouldn't work correctly as a tag in Obsidian. With --tag_activities=False they won't break when the note is displayed in Obsidian.

Custom moods

Daylio supports exactly five predefined mood groups: rad, good, neutral, bad, and awful. Each group in Daylio initially maps to exactly one mood of the same name, but user is free to expand this list with their own moods.

To use your own expanded mood vocabulary, create a .json file with the five mood groups as keys, each containing an array of mood names:

{
    "rad": ["rad", "blissful", "excited"],
    "good": ["vaguely good", "grateful", "captivated"],
    "neutral": ["vaguely ok", "focused", "bored"],
    "bad": ["frustrated", "anxious", "drained"],
    "awful": ["awful", "lifeless", "miserable"]
}

Only the five standard group keys (rad, good, neutral, bad, awful) are recognised. Unknown keys are silently ignored. Duplicate and empty mood names are skipped.

Note: Custom moods can be passed via path_to_moods when using the library programmatically. There is currently no CLI flag for this.

Expected CSV format

The converter expects the standard Daylio CSV export format:

full_date,date,weekday,time,mood,activities,note_title,note
2022-10-26,October 26,Wednesday,10:00 PM,captivated,at the office | board game,,"Sed ut est interdum"

All columns must be present. activities, note_title, and note may be empty.

Note: Newer versions of Daylio may include a scales column in the export. Scales are not yet supported and may cause issues since the parser currently expects exactly 8 columns.

Known limitations

• --force is not yet implemented. The flag is accepted by the parser but has no effect — files are always silently overwritten.
• --color is not yet implemented. The flag is accepted but mood colour coding is not applied.
• No CLI flag for custom moods. Custom mood sets can only be used through the Python API, not from the command line.
• Scales are not supported. The scales column introduced in newer Daylio exports is not parsed.
• Entries at the same time on the same day are overwritten. If two entries share the exact same date and time, only the last one in the CSV is kept.

Exit codes

Contributors are encouraged to use custom exit codes when raising critical exceptions. You can define new exit codes as necessary. Integration tests that only have access to the stdout and stderr of the CLI can then assess the cause of failure with the edit code.

Code	Meaning
0	Success
2	Invalid command-line arguments (argparse)
150	Keyboard interruption
151	Cannot access or parse the .csv file
152	The .csv produced no valid journal entries

Project structure

src/obsidian_daylio_parser/
├── __main__.py        # CLI entry point
├── config.py          # Argument parsing and defaults
├── errors.py          # Logging setup and base error classes
├── group.py           # EntriesFrom — groups entries by date, outputs .md
├── journal_entry.py   # Entry — a single journal entry
├── librarian.py       # Librarian — orchestrates CSV parsing and file output
├── utils.py           # Date/time parsing, slugify, file loaders
└── entry/
    └── mood.py        # Moodverse — mood group management

Development

git clone https://github.com/DeutscheGabanna/Obsidian-Daylio-Parser.git
cd Obsidian-Daylio-Parser
pip install pipenv
pipenv install --dev

Running tests

pipenv run coverage run -m unittest discover -s . -t .

Publishing

Pushes to the dev-stage branch trigger a test publish to TestPyPI. To publish to the official PyPI repository, merge into main and create a new release.

Linting

pip install flake8
flake8 src/

Requirements

• Python ≥ 3.10

License

GPL-3.0