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Introducing Agent Skill Installer

ยท 3 min read
Omry Yadan
Omry Yadan
Software engineer and open-source maintainer

Agent Skill Installer started as a by-product of another project I am working on. That project needed to install a skill reliably and easily, and the installer came out useful enough that I decided to make it available more generally.

Agent skills are useful when they are easy to try. The awkward part is usually not writing SKILL.md; it is getting the files into the right place, making the agent aware of them, and later remembering exactly what was installed.

Agent Skill Installer is a small Python tool for that part of the job. It installs Codex and Claude Code skills from GitHub, PyPI, a local checkout, or a local wheel file. Installation can be global for the current user or specific to a repository.

Agent Skill Installer interactive source picker

Copying a skill into place by hand is fine once. Doing it repeatedly, across different repositories, different agents, and different packaging shapes, starts to feel like a checklist that should belong to a tool.

The installer keeps the surface deliberately narrow. A local checkout is useful while developing a skill. A local wheel file is useful when testing the exact artifact you plan to publish. GitHub and PyPI are useful once the skill is ready to share. The install target can be the current repository, or the user's global agent home.

For scripts and CI, the no-UI path is explicit:

agent-skill-installer --no-ui install \
  --skill-path ./my-skill \
  --editable \
  --agent codex \
  --scope repo

For humans, the terminal UI walks through the same choices: install or uninstall, source, target agent, and install scope.

Skill authors can also include an optional agent-skill-installer.yaml next to SKILL.md to customize the discoverability text written for Codex or Claude Code. The format also has agent-specific sections for vendor-specific hook mechanisms instead of pretending every agent exposes the same shape. For example, a packaged skill can carry Codex hook config such as UserPromptSubmit, PreToolUse, or SessionStart, and Claude Code hook config such as UserPromptSubmit, PreToolUse, Notification, or PreCompact.

The installer validates that config against its local schema during installation, so packaging mistakes fail early instead of quietly landing in a user's agent setup.

None of this is meant to be grand. The goal is to make installing agent skills pleasant instead of daunting, especially when moving from "this works on my machine" to "someone else can install this too."

Install it from PyPI:

python -m pip install agent-skill-installer

The project is on GitHub, on PyPI, and the README links to the installation, authoring, packaging, and API guides.