Creating a marketplace

Build a personal or org-level marketplace with skills curated for your conventions. Authoring one is a terminal job start to finish — a marketplace is a Git repository the CLI scaffolds, packages and indexes, and the editor reads catalogues rather than building them. Distributing one is the other way round, and that section is at the foot of this page.

Quick start

npx agents-inc new marketplace acme   # scaffold a marketplace the CLI already accepts
cd acme                               # replace the placeholder author, then the example skill
npx agents-inc build plugins          # package each skill and agent
npx agents-inc build marketplace      # write marketplace.json, the index an install reads

Point a project at it with npx agents-inc init --marketplace github:acme/skills. The rest of this page is what each of those steps expects of the directory, and what build marketplace refuses to publish.

Getting Started

The fastest way to start is to scaffold one:

npx agents-inc new marketplace acme

That writes a marketplace the CLI already accepts — its skill ids are namespaced for you, its rules file loads, and doctor passes in the new directory. You can also build one by hand; four things make a directory a marketplace the CLI can read:

package.json                  # name, version, description and author — all four required
config/skill-categories.ts    # the categories your skills fall into
config/skill-rules.ts         # relationships — see the note below
config/stacks.ts              # the stacks the wizard offers
src/skills/{skill-name}/      # at least one skill — SKILL.md + metadata.yaml

A note on config/skill-rules.ts. Relationship rules — conflicts, requires, alternatives — currently name skills from the public catalogue only. Your own skills cannot be named there yet, and a rule that names one will fail to load. The file itself is still required, so ship it with a version and no relationships:

export default { version: "1.0.0" }

Your marketplace works fully without them: skills install, reach their sub-agents and compile. What you lose is the wizard’s incompatibility hints between your own skills. Generating those automatically is planned.

Copy the shapes of those four config files from the public marketplace at agents-inc/skills, which is the reference implementation of every one of them. npx agents-inc doctor reads a marketplace and reports what is missing or malformed, so run it against your directory before pointing a project at it.

Name your skills for your marketplace

Every skill id in your marketplace must begin with your marketplace’s name. If your package.json names the marketplace acme, its skills are acme-web-frontend, acme-api-database, and so on — never a bare web-frontend.

This is what lets your marketplace coexist with the public one and with any other. A skill id is the name of the directory it installs into, and a machine can hold installs at two scopes — one in your home directory, one in a project. Two marketplaces both shipping a bare web-frontend would put two different skills under one name, and whichever landed second would quietly win. Prefixing makes every id unique, so the two simply never meet.

Three names you cannot use

agents-inc, external and local are reserved, and build marketplace refuses them.

agents-inc is the public marketplace’s own namespace — its skills are unprefixed, so the bare web-frontend and everything like it already belong to it. external and local hold the skills that belong to no marketplace at all: one you added from a repository, one you wrote yourself. Publishing under any of the three would claim ids that are not yours.

Pick anything else. Your package.json name is the default, and --name overrides it when that name is npm-scoped.

What the build checks

build marketplace refuses to write a marketplace.json if either rule is broken:

Marketplace 'acme' ships 2 skill id(s) outside its own namespace.
Every skill id must begin with the marketplace's name:
  api-framework-hono -> acme-api-framework-hono
  web-framework-react -> acme-web-framework-react
Rename each skill directory and the id in its metadata, re-run 'build
plugins', then build the marketplace again.

A refused build writes nothing, so a marketplace that would break on someone else’s machine never gets published in the first place.

Workflow

1. Start with existing skills from the public marketplace or write your own
2. Iterate on skills using the skill-summoner subagent to align them with your project conventions
3. Build the marketplace index:

npx agents-inc build marketplace

This generates marketplace.json, the index that the CLI reads when installing from your marketplace.

4. Point a project at your marketplace when you install it:

npx agents-inc init --marketplace github:acme/skills

Choosing a marketplace happens at init — that is the moment an install decides where its skills come from. edit changes what you have installed, not where it comes from.

Distribution

Marketplaces are Git repositories. Share them by giving your team access to the repo, and the route in from there is the editor’s Marketplace button: owner/repo, plus a token for a private one. That fetch goes straight to GitHub from the browser, so the token stays there and reaches nothing else. The id the editor hands out afterwards carries the marketplace it read, so a teammate running init --from <id> resolves your skills against your repository without having to name it. See Marketplaces in the editor, and Use a private marketplace for the consumer’s whole side of it.

Doing this from the terminal

npx agents-inc init --marketplace github:acme/skills names it at install time. The flag outranks whatever a --from payload carries — naming one is an instruction about this install, where the payload’s ref is only a record of where the sharer’s came from.

Skills and stacks can also be packaged as Claude Code plugins:

npx agents-inc build plugins    # Package individual skills and agents