dsh-skills

npm: @dennisrongo/dsh-skills · source: dennisrongo/dsh-plugins

Serves the @dennisrongo/skills library to dsh as a skill provider, so the whole catalog installs and updates as one npm dependency.

Mind the scope. The unscoped dsh-skills on npm is an unrelated plugin by another author, so add dsh-skills fetches theirs, not this one.

dsh plugin --profile <name> add @dennisrongo/dsh-skills

That is the entire install. The library ships as this plugin's own dependency, so there is no clone to make, no directory to create, and nothing to link.

Why a plugin and not a link script

Skills are normally dropped into <agentsHome>/skills and discovered from there. That works well for keeping an already installed catalog fresh — which is what scripts/link-superpowers-skills.mjs does for a superpowers clone — but it is not an install path: it presumes ~/.agents/skills exists, and nothing in the harness creates it. A missing root is discovered as an empty list, not an error, so a fresh machine gets a silently empty catalog and no diagnostic.

Making the library an npm dependency of a plugin moves the whole problem into pnpm, which already solves it.

Updating

# what is behind, across the whole profile
dsh plugin --profile <name> outdated

# newest CATALOG (the usual case — skills changed, plugin did not)
dsh plugin --profile <name> update @dennisrongo/skills

# newest PLUGIN (provider logic changed)
dsh plugin --profile <name> update @dennisrongo/dsh-skills

# check what is out there first
npm view @dennisrongo/skills version

then restart the profile. dsh plugin is a thin pnpm forwarder, so every pnpm subcommand works. The plugin declares @dennisrongo/skills: ^0.16.0, so skills move with a normal dependency bump and the plugin only needs a release for a major.

You will see this on install — it is orientation, not a fault:

warning: @dennisrongo/skills declares no dsh.bundle — installed as a plain dependency

The library is a plain library; only the plugin is a bundle.

Pointing it at a clone

Contributors editing skills can bypass the packaged copy entirely. Resolution order, first hit wins:

1. skillsRoot in the profile's cordis.patch.yml
2. the DSH_SKILLS_ROOT environment variable
3. this plugin's own @dennisrongo/skills dependency
4. a probe of common clone locations under $HOME

# <profile>/cordis.patch.yml — a bare id: CONFIGURES the self-mounted row
- id: skills
  config:
    skillsRoot: /absolute/path/to/claude-skills

Bodies are read when the catalog is collected, so edits under a clone land without reinstalling. If nothing resolves, the plugin warns naming every knob and registers nothing — dsh still boots.

Config

key	default	meaning
skillsRoot	"" → resolved (see above)	root containing skills/<name>/SKILL.md
enabled	true	set false for a clean-baseline profile

Precedence

Skills register into the profile's global layer, which every agent preset sees. A nearer layer wins outright, so a project's own .dsh/skills still shadows a library skill of the same name — the library is a baseline, not an override.

Known upstream defect

5 of the 31 skills in @dennisrongo/[email protected] — code-review, e2e-verify, maestro-mobile-test, nextjs-app-router, task-executor — have frontmatter that is not valid YAML: an unquoted description containing a literal ": " parses as a nested mapping. They are skipped with a warning.

This is upstream in dennisrongo/claude-skills, not in this plugin: dsh's own skill-filesystem provider uses the same parser and drops them identically. Quoting or folding those descriptions upstream fixes it, and the plugin picks them up on the next update with no change here.

Notes

• The folder is plugins/dsh-skills but the package is @dennisrongo/dsh-skills. Mind the scope: the unscoped dsh-skills on npm is an unrelated plugin by another author, so add dsh-skills fetches theirs, not this one.
• @deepseek-ai/cordis and @deepseek-ai/schemastery are peers supplied by your dsh install; yaml is a real dependency because scripts/anchor.mjs only anchors @deepseek-ai/*.

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About the author

Plugins and walkthroughs on YouTube @codingmenace — I build AI coding tools in public, including DeepSeek Harness itself. More at dennisrongo.com.