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This walks through connecting ObsidianLog to Sia for real, using the hosted Sia Storage indexer at sia.storage. You don’t need to run Sia infrastructure yourself, but you will approve ObsidianLog through a Sia Storage account during setup. Takes about ten minutes, most of it waiting on a one-time Sia write.

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1. Get the binary

Download and extract the release binary for your system, following Installing a release binary in the Quickstart (or the FAQ if you’re not sure which file to grab). The sia backend is already built into the official release binary, so there’s nothing extra to install or compile. The rest of this tutorial writes commands as ./obsidianlog (macOS/Linux). On Windows, that’s .\obsidianlog.exe instead.

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2. Run init and choose Sia

Using a separate --config path like this keeps this test’s configuration and local data separate from anything you set up in the local backend tutorial. The credential bundle is shared by your OS user, though: if you already ran init, ObsidianLog safely reuses the existing encryption key and adds the Sia app key to that bundle. For a genuinely clean keychain-prompt test, use a separate OS user or test keychain, not merely a different config path. Answer the prompts, and when asked for a storage backend, choose sia. You’ll then be asked for an indexd URL (press Enter to accept the default, sia.storage) and a recovery phrase. Type seed to generate a brand new one:
Save the newly generated phrase somewhere safe. It’s the master key for your Sia account, and ObsidianLog never stores it for you. Never use a recovery phrase shown in documentation or shared by someone else.

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3. Approve the connection in your browser

Open that URL and approve. init blocks until you do. Once approved, init finishes the remaining prompts (bind address, chunk window) and writes your config. On macOS, this whole flow should cost at most one keychain prompt, separate from the browser approval step. Please note how many you actually saw.

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4. Start the server and send a log

Leave that terminal running. Open a second terminal in the same extracted release folder, then send the test log:
The first write to a brand new Sia account can take several minutes, not seconds. It’s forming a real storage contract behind the scenes, and a plain curl gives you no progress indicator while that happens. If it seems to hang, that’s expected. Just let it run. Subsequent writes are much faster.

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5. Query and verify

query decrypts and prints the log line back, and verify walks the hash chain and confirms nothing archived has been tampered with, exactly like a local backend install. The difference here is that this data actually lives on the Sia network now, encrypted under a key only you hold.

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Tell us how it went

Please open a feedback report either way. If you noticed roughly how long init took, or how long the first write took before curl returned, those numbers help a lot. There’s a spot for them in the form.

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What’s next

Try Testing as a Returning User to see how ObsidianLog behaves when you re-run init later, instead of only on a fresh install, or Testing with Vector to see a real log shipper feed it instead of a single curl request. Once you’re done testing and want a real, ongoing setup rather than a scratch folder, see the Quickstart. When you finish the tutorial, return to the terminal running serve and press Ctrl-C to stop it.