api

API

skills-registry exposes two user-facing surfaces. The MCP server is what an autonomous coding agent talks to; the CLI is what a human types in a terminal. Both wrap the same registry.Client contract against the same GitHub registry repo, and both honor the same config file at ~/.config/skills-mcp/registry.toml.

The two surfaces

The MCP server is a FastMCP stdio process spawned by desktop clients (Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code/Copilot). It registers three tools — list_skills, get_skill, publish_skill — and proxies every call through gh api so that no git binary or SSH agent is required at runtime. See ../apps/mcp-server.md for the boot-time validation, exit codes, and tool registration mechanics.

The CLI is the Go binary dropped on disk by install.sh. A bare skill-registry invocation routes to the first-run wizard or the dashboard hub based on whether config exists; named subcommands give scripted callers the same operations the hub exposes. Every subcommand honors a persistent --json flag for machine-readable output. See ../apps/cli/subcommands.md for the implementation deep dive.

Pages in this section

Page	What it covers
MCP tools	The three FastMCP tools: signatures, argument schemas, return shapes, side effects, annotation profiles, and the cache flow for get_skill.
CLI commands	The seven subcommands: usage lines, flag tables, --json payload shapes, behaviour summaries, and the shouldAutoYes() rule that controls destructive-action auto-confirmation.

Quick map

MCP agent  ─────►  list_skills        ─┐
                   get_skill           │
                   publish_skill       │
                                       ├──►  RegistryClient (Python)
Terminal   ─────►  skill-registry list ─┤            │
                   skill-registry get   │            ▼
                   skill-registry sync  │      gh api → GitHub
                   skill-registry add   │
                   skill-registry pub   │
                   skill-registry rm    │
                   skill-registry boot ─┘

The two surfaces are intentionally symmetric: anything you can do interactively from the CLI, an agent can do from the MCP server (modulo add and sync, which are CLI-only because they walk the local filesystem). Read names and slug rules are identical on both sides — see ../primitives/skill.md for the slugify contract every surface shares.

What's not here

• The bootstrap push path. PushTreeViaGit is a CLI-only fast path for first-time bulk imports; it isn't exposed as an MCP tool. See ../systems/bootstrap-push.md.
• The dashboard hub and onboarding wizard. These are CLI flows that compose the same handlers the subcommands use. See ../apps/cli/wizard-and-hub.md.
• Config resolution. The SKILLS_REGISTRY env var and the TOML file format are documented under ../reference/configuration.md; the in-memory shape is documented in ../primitives/registry-config.md.