Add skills

Give an agent access to skills that are published in agentregistry. Skills are loaded into the agent at runtime and made available under the /skills folder.

Before you begin

1. Follow the Get started guide to set up agentregistry and start the agentregistry daemon.
2. Create an agent.
3. Create a skill and publish it to agentregistry.

Add a skill

You can add a skill to your agent from two sources: a published skill in agentregistry, or a container image directly.

From the registry

Add a skill that was previously published to agentregistry by referencing the skill name in the registry.

1. List the skills that are published in agentregistry.

   arctl skill list

   Example output:

   NAME                   TITLE   VERSION   TYPE     SOURCE
   hello-world-template           1.0.0     docker   docker.io/user/hello-world-template:v1.0.0

2. Add the skill to your agent.

   arctl agent add-skill my-skill \
     --project-dir myagent \
     --registry-skill-name hello-world-template \
     --registry-skill-version 1.0.0 \
     --image 
   If the skill is packaged as a Docker image, you can reference it directly without publishing to the registry first.

   arctl agent add-skill my-skill \
     --project-dir myagent \
     --image docker.io/user/hello-world-template:v1.0.0

   Example output:

   ✓ Added skill 'my-skill' to agent.yaml

   You can optionally specify a version and a registry URL:

   Flag	Description
   --registry-skill-name	Name of the skill in the registry. Required.
   --registry-skill-version	Version to use. If omitted, the latest version is used.
   --registry-url	Registry URL. If omitted, the default registry is used.

3. After adding a skill, verify that the agent.yaml file was updated.

   cat myagent/agent.yaml

   Example output:

   agentName: myagent
   image: ghcr.io/myagent:latest
   language: python
   framework: adk
   modelProvider: gemini
   modelName: gemini-2.0-flash
   description: ""
   skills:
       - name: my-skill
         registryURL: http://localhost:12121
         registrySkillName: hello-world-template
   

4. Re-build the agent image.

   arctl agent build myagent

5. Run the agent. When you run an agent locally, agentregistry resolves the skills from the registry and makes them available to the agent. Wait for the agent dialog to open.

   arctl agent run myagent

   During startup, arctl:

   1. Resolves each skill in the agent manifest from the registry.
   2. Downloads the skill contents. Docker-packaged skills are extracted from the container image. GitHub-hosted skills are cloned from the repository.
   3. Places all skill files in a temporary directory and sets the KAGENT_SKILLS_FOLDER environment variable to point to it.
   4. Mounts the skills directory into the agent container at /skills (read-only). The agent can then load and use the skills from the /skills folder at runtime.

6. Ask the agent to describe what skills it has access to. Verify that you see the hello-world-template tool.

   

   

Next

Deploy the agent to your environment.

Cleanup

To remove a skill from the agent, edit the agent.yaml file and remove the skill reference from the skills list. Then, re-build and re-run or re-deploy the agent.