elyra can create skills. Ask it to build one for your use case.

Skills

Skills are self-contained capability packages that the agent loads on-demand. A skill provides specialized workflows, setup instructions, helper scripts, and reference documentation for specific tasks.

Elyra implements the Agent Skills standard, warning about violations but remaining lenient.

Table of Contents

• Locations
• How Skills Work
• Stack Relevance
• Skill Commands
• Skill Structure
• Frontmatter
• Validation
• Example
• Skill Repositories

Locations

Security: Skills can instruct the model to perform any action and may include executable code the model invokes. Review skill content before use.

Elyra loads skills from:

• Global:
  • ~/.elyra/agent/skills/
  • ~/.agents/skills/
• Project:
  • .elyra/skills/
  • .agents/skills/ in cwd and ancestor directories (up to git repo root, or filesystem root when not in a repo)
• Packages: skills/ directories or elyra.skills entries in package.json
• Settings: skills array with files or directories
• CLI: --skill <path> (repeatable, additive even with --no-skills)

Discovery rules:

• In ~/.elyra/agent/skills/ and .elyra/skills/, direct root .md files are discovered as individual skills
• In all skill locations, directories containing SKILL.md are discovered recursively
• In ~/.agents/skills/ and project .agents/skills/, root .md files are ignored

Disable discovery with --no-skills (explicit --skill paths still load).

Using Skills from Other Harnesses

To use skills from Claude Code or OpenAI Codex, add their directories to settings:

{
  "skills": [
    "~/.claude/skills",
    "~/.codex/skills"
  ]
}

For project-level Claude Code skills, add to .elyra/settings.json:

{
  "skills": ["../.claude/skills"]
}

How Skills Work

1. At startup, elyra scans skill locations and extracts names and descriptions
2. The system prompt includes available skills in XML format per the specification
3. When a task matches, the agent uses read to load the full SKILL.md (models don't always do this; use prompting or /skill:name to force it)
4. The agent follows the instructions, using relative paths to reference scripts and assets

This is progressive disclosure: only descriptions are always in context, full instructions load on-demand.

Stack Relevance

Elyra detects the project's frameworks (Laravel, Livewire, Flux UI, Inertia, Vue, React, Svelte, Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, Filament, TypeScript, Vite, Elyra Framework) from composer.json, package.json, and Cargo.toml. Skills whose name, description, compatibility, or metadata.tags / metadata.stack mention a detected framework (or a common alias such as flux, eloquent, blade, pest, tailwind, alpine) are listed first in <available_skills> with a <relevant-to> element, preceded by a lead-in telling the model to read them first. Matching is case-insensitive on whole tokens, so react does not match reactive.

To make a skill's stack explicit without padding the description, add tags in the frontmatter metadata mapping:

---
name: livewire-testing
description: Write and run component tests for Livewire components.
metadata:
  tags: [laravel, livewire, pest]
---

Skill Commands

Skills register as /skill:name commands:

/skill:brave-search           # Load and execute the skill
/skill:pdf-tools extract      # Load skill with arguments

Arguments after the command are appended to the skill content as User: <args>.

Toggle skill commands via /settings in interactive mode or in settings.json:

{
  "enableSkillCommands": true
}

Skill Structure

A skill is a directory with a SKILL.md file. Everything else is freeform.

my-skill/
├── SKILL.md              # Required: frontmatter + instructions
├── scripts/              # Helper scripts
│   └── process.sh
├── references/           # Detailed docs loaded on-demand
│   └── api-reference.md
└── assets/
    └── template.json

SKILL.md Format

---
name: my-skill
description: What this skill does and when to use it. Be specific.
---

# My Skill

## Setup

Run once before first use:
```bash
cd /path/to/skill && npm install
```

## Usage

```bash
./scripts/process.sh <input>
```

Use relative paths from the skill directory:

See the reference guide for details.

Frontmatter

Per the Agent Skills specification:

Name Rules

• 1-64 characters
• Lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens only
• No leading/trailing hyphens
• No consecutive hyphens
• Must match parent directory name

Valid: pdf-processing, data-analysis, code-review Invalid: PDF-Processing, -pdf, pdf--processing

Description Best Practices

The description determines when the agent loads the skill. Be specific.

Good:

description: Extracts text and tables from PDF files, fills PDF forms, and merges multiple PDFs. Use when working with PDF documents.

Poor:

description: Helps with PDFs.

Validation

Elyra validates skills against the Agent Skills standard. Most issues produce warnings but still load the skill:

• Name doesn't match parent directory
• Name exceeds 64 characters or contains invalid characters
• Name starts/ends with hyphen or has consecutive hyphens
• Description exceeds 1024 characters

Unknown frontmatter fields are ignored.

Exception: Skills with missing description are not loaded.

Name collisions (same name from different locations) warn and keep the first skill found.

Example

brave-search/
├── SKILL.md
├── search.js
└── content.js

SKILL.md:

---
name: brave-search
description: Web search and content extraction via Brave Search API. Use for searching documentation, facts, or any web content.
---

# Brave Search

## Setup

```bash
cd /path/to/brave-search && npm install
```

## Search

```bash
./search.js "query"              # Basic search
./search.js "query" --content    # Include page content
```

## Extract Page Content

```bash
./content.js https://example.com
```

Skill Repositories

• Anthropic Skills - Document processing (docx, pdf, pptx, xlsx), web development
• Elyra Skills - Web search, browser automation, Google APIs, transcription