skills-mcp

An MCP server that lets any AI agent discover, search, and install 9,000+ agent skills from across the GitHub ecosystem (Anthropic, Superpowers, wshobson, antigravity, Composio, antfu, TerminalSkills, and more).

skillsmcp.intelliforge.tech — browse the catalog and the install steps in the browser.

<p align="center"> <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gengirish/skills-mcp/main/assets/demo.svg" alt="Terminal demo: the user asks their agent to find a Stripe skill and install it. The agent calls search_skills, gets 5 matches out of the full catalog, fetches the SKILL.md, and installs it into ~/.cursor/skills/adding-stripe/." width="820"> </p> <p align="center"> _{Scripted terminal recreation — every result, count and path in it is real <code>skills-mcp</code> output.<br> Also available as <a href="assets/demo.gif">GIF</a> and <a href="assets/demo.mp4">MP4</a>.} </p>

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Why

Agent skills — the SKILL.md packages that teach Cursor, Claude Code and friends how to do one specific job well — are scattered across a dozen unrelated GitHub repos. Anthropic publishes a handful. Superpowers, wshobson, antigravity, Composio, TerminalSkills and others publish thousands more. There is no index, no search, and no install path: you find a skill by already knowing which repo it lives in, then copy a folder by hand. skills-mcp collapses that into one MCP server — 9,000+ skills from 11 repos, searchable from inside your editor and installable in a single tool call.

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What it does

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) lets editors like Cursor, Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cline, Continue, Windsurf, and OpenCode plug in external tool providers. This server provides:

| Tool | Purpose | |---|---| | search_skills | Free-text + faceted search (domain / repo / tier) | | get_skill | Fetch the full SKILL.md content from upstream GitHub | | recommend_skills | "I want to add Stripe to Next.js" → ranked skill suggestions | | list_domains | All 20 logical domains with skill counts | | list_repos | All source repositories with counts and links | | install_skill | Download a skill folder into your IDE's skills directory | | catalog_stats | Versions, generation time, totals |

Plus a resource (skills://catalog) exposing the full JSON index.

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Quick stats

| | | |---|---| | Skills indexed | | | Source repositories | 11 | | Logical domains | 20 (testing, security, devops, ai-ml, frontend, backend, data, marketing, docs, …) | | Top domain | AI/ML/LLM (6,991 skills) | | Top repo | antigravity-awesome-skills (6,308 skills) |

Counts are from the catalog build on 2026-08-03 and grow with the daily refresh — catalog_stats always reports the live figure.

The catalog is built directly from upstream GitHub repos (no local clones needed) by scripts/build-catalog.mjs and shipped inside the npm package — so search_skills has zero network latency. get_skill and install_skill fetch live from GitHub on demand.

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Installation

Install it once, globally. Every config below then points at the skills-mcp binary:

npm i -g @gengirish/skills-mcp
skills-mcp
# [skills-mcp] v1.0.1 ready · 9324 skills · 11 repos

It then waits on stdin for JSON-RPC, which is what your client speaks. Ctrl-C to exit.

Why not npx -y @gengirish/skills-mcp? It works, but npx re-resolves the package on every launch — measured at ~13s to reach the ready banner versus ~0.5s for the installed binary. Several MCP clients give a server less than that to complete the handshake and will report the server as failed to connect. Use npx only for a one-off try; install globally for anything you actually use.

Cursor

Edit ~/.cursor/mcp.json (or per-project .cursor/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "skills": {
      "command": "skills-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Restart Cursor. The agent will auto-discover the tools.

Claude Desktop

Edit ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) or %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json (Windows):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "skills": {
      "command": "skills-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Claude Code (CLI)

claude mcp add skills -- skills-mcp          # macOS / Linux
claude mcp add skills -- cmd /c skills-mcp   # Windows

The -- is required. Without it claude mcp add parses the rest as its own flags and fails with error: unknown option. On Windows the cmd /c wrapper is needed because the global npm binary is a .cmd shim. Add -s user to register it for every project instead of just the current one.

Check it took:

claude mcp list        # skills: ... - ✓ Connected

Cline (VS Code extension)

In Cline's settings → MCP Servers, add:

{
  "skills": {
    "command": "skills-mcp"
  }
}

Continue

In ~/.continue/config.yaml:

mcpServers:
  - name: skills
    command: skills-mcp

Windsurf / OpenCode / others

Any MCP-compatible client: spawn skills-mcp over stdio.

Optional: avoid GitHub rate limits

get_skill and install_skill hit GitHub. Anonymous = 60 req/hr, authenticated = 5,000 req/hr. Set:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "skills": {
      "command": "skills-mcp",
      "env": { "GITHUB_TOKEN": "ghp_…[redacted]" }
    }
  }
}

A token with no scopes (read-only public access) is sufficient.

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Usage examples

Once installed, talk to your agent naturally:

"Use the skills tool to find me skills related to Stripe payments."

"Recommend skills for building a Next.js app with auth and a Postgres database."

"Install the systematic-debugging skill into my Cursor."

"Show me everything tagged 'security' from the wshobson repo."

The agent will call the appropriate tool and act on the results.

Direct tool calls (for power users / scripts)

{
  "tool": "search_skills",
  "arguments": { "query": "kubernetes deploy", "domain": "devops", "limit": 5 }
}

{
  "tool": "install_skill",
  "arguments": {
    "id": "anthropic-skills/skills/skill-creator/SKILL.md",
    "ide": "cursor"
  }
}

ide accepts: cursor (default), claude-code, claude, codex, windsurf, opencode, or custom (with explicit target_dir).

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Source repositories indexed

| Repo | Skills | Tier | |---|---:|---| | zebbern/antigravity-awesome-skills | 6,308 | Mega bundle | | TerminalSkills/skills | 1,016 | Cross-tool | | ComposioHQ/awesome-claude-skills | 864 | Curated | | alirezarezvani/claude-skills | 798 | Production teams | | wshobson/agents | 180 | Plugin marketplace | | spencerpauly/awesome-cursor-skills | 65 | Cursor-native | | obra/superpowers-skills | 31 | Framework | | antfu/skills | 19 | Curated | | anthropics/skills | 18 | Official | | obra/superpowers | 14 | Framework | | gmh5225/awesome-skills | 8 | Curated |

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Domains

Each skill is automatically tagged into one or more of:

testing · debugging · security · devops · data · ai-ml · frontend · mobile · backend · documents · git-collab · performance · design · marketing-content · business-pm · automation · meta-skills · documentation · blockchain · other

Tagging rules live in scripts/classify.mjs (shared by the catalog builder and the Explorer UI's adapter).

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Local development

git clone https://github.com/gengirish/skills-mcp
cd skills-mcp
npm install
GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_xxx npm run build:catalog   # ~5–10 min first time
npm run build                                 # compile TS
npm run inspect                               # MCP Inspector
node scripts/smoke-test.mjs                   # JSON-RPC smoke test

A fine-grained PAT with public-repo read access is enough. Without it, GitHub limits unauthenticated requests to 60 req/hr — the build will still work for tiny subsets via --only=… but won't complete a full refresh.

Project layout:

skills-mcp/
├── src/
│   ├── index.ts        # MCP server (tools + resources)
│   ├── catalog.ts      # JSON catalog loader
│   ├── search.ts       # Fuse.js fuzzy search + filters
│   └── fetcher.ts      # GitHub raw + API download logic
├── scripts/
│   ├── build-catalog.mjs   # GitHub-native catalog builder
│   ├── classify.mjs        # shared domain classification rules
│   ├── smoke-test.mjs      # JSON-RPC stdio smoke test
│   ├── test-install.mjs    # end-to-end install test
│   ├── make-demo.mjs       # README demo (animated SVG + GIF/MP4 frames)
│   └── make-social.mjs     # 1280x640 social preview card
├── sources.json        # declarative list of upstream repos + globs
├── .cache/             # per-repo SHA-keyed cache (gitignored)
├── assets/             # demo.svg / demo.gif / demo.mp4 / social-preview.*
├── data/
│   └── catalog.json    # generated, ~5 MB (committed)
└── dist/               # tsc output (published)

Regenerating the marketing assets

Both generators are dependency-free and emit SVG:

node scripts/make-demo.mjs        # -> assets/demo.svg (animated, 20s loop)
node scripts/make-social.mjs      # -> assets/social-preview.svg

demo.svg degrades gracefully: where CSS animation doesn't run, it renders the finished transcript instead of an empty window. To refresh the raster copies (needs ffmpeg):

node scripts/make-demo.mjs --frames                                  # assets/.frames/*.svg
npx @resvg/resvg-js-cli assets/social-preview.svg assets/social-preview.png
# rasterise .frames to PNG, then:
ffmpeg -framerate 10 -i png/f%04d.png -i palette.png \
  -lavfi "[0:v]mpdecimate=hi=200:lo=100:frac=0.005[d];[d][1:v]paletteuse=dither=none:diff_mode=rectangle" \
  -vsync vfr -loop 0 -final_delay 450 assets/demo.gif

The mpdecimate + -vsync vfr pass collapses the static holds into single long frames — it takes the GIF from ~4 MB to ~316 KB with no visible change.

Refreshing the catalog

# Incremental: only fetches repos whose HEAD SHA changed.
GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_xxx npm run build:catalog

# Full refetch (ignore .cache/):
GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_xxx npm run build:catalog -- --force --report

# A single repo:
npm run build:catalog -- --only=anthropic-skills

# Include the giant aggregator (~227k entries; very slow):
npm run build:catalog -- --include-registry

Adding a new source: append an entry to sources.json with {key, owner, repo, branch, label, tier, upstream, include}. Re-run npm run build:catalog and the new repo'