Keeping Your Vault Up To Date
The Celestial Vault keeps itself current: a quiet daily check, a small dialog with the changelog, and an Update now button. Your notes are never touched.
The Celestial Vault is a living product. New features, new art, and fixes ship over time, and your vault picks them up by itself. No re-downloading the zip, no manual file surgery, no losing your settings.
This page covers how the update system works and the few controls you have over it.
How Automatic Updates Work
Once a day, shortly after you open Obsidian, the vault quietly asks the update server whether a newer version exists for your license. If you're current, nothing happens; you'll never see a popup that says "no news".
When an update does exist, a small dialog appears:
- The new version number
- A short changelog of what's new
- Two buttons: Later and Update now
Click Update now and the update installs in place, right inside your open vault. A progress counter ticks along, a confirmation notice appears, and the updated plugins reload themselves. You keep working; no restart ceremony required.
Click Later and nothing changes. The dialog will offer the same update again on a future launch.
Your data is never touched.
Updates only ever replace the vault's system files: plugin code, theme, snippets, templates, artwork. Your notes, your settings, your license, and your streak are never touched. This is enforced both by the update server and by the vault itself; an update pack is rejected outright if it tries to reach anything personal.
Every downloaded file is also integrity-checked before a single byte lands on disk. If anything fails verification, the update aborts and your vault stays exactly as it was.
Checking Manually
You don't have to wait for the daily check. Two ways to check right now:
From Settings
Settings → Celestial Plugin → Updates → Check for updates
The row also shows your current version, so you always know where you stand.
From The Command Palette
Cmd/Ctrl + P → "Check for Celestial Vault updates"
Either way: if you're current, a notice says so. If not, the update dialog appears.
The Settings, Top To Bottom
Settings → Celestial Plugin → Updates has three rows:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Celestial Vault v… | Shows your installed version, with the Check for updates button |
| Automatic update checks | The once-a-day quiet check. On by default. Nothing ever installs without asking you first |
| Install update from file | Offline fallback; see below |
Turning Automatic update checks off means the vault never phones the update server on its own. You can still check manually whenever you like.
The Offline Fallback
If your vault machine is offline, or you simply prefer manual control, updates are also distributed as downloadable update packs (a celestial-update-<version>.json file) from the store.
- Download the pack on any device
- Settings → Celestial Plugin → Updates → Install update from file → Pick update file
- Select the pack
The same safety rules apply: every file in the pack is integrity-checked before anything is written, and your notes and settings are off-limits.
What Updates Need From You
- A valid license. The update check authenticates with your license key, the same one that unlocked the vault. No separate account, no extra sign-in. (See License Unification & Your 3 Devices.)
- An internet connection for the automatic path. Without one, the check silently skips and tries again another day.
That's the whole list.
If you've customized system files.
An update can overwrite the vault's own snippets, templates, and theme files. Your personal copies are safe: a renamed snippet, your own templates, and anything you created survive every update. The CSS snippets page explains the copy-then-customize pattern that makes your tweaks update-proof.
If An Update Fails Midway
Rare, but honest answer: if your disk hiccups halfway through, the vault tells you the update was partially applied instead of pretending nothing happened. Run the update again; files are re-downloaded, re-verified, and the apply completes. Your notes are never part of the blast radius either way.
Up Next
- License Unification & Your 3 Devices — the key that authenticates your updates
- Celestial CSS Snippets — making your customizations update-proof
- The Settings Tab — the full settings walkthrough