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Ankra Agent Skills are SKILL.md instruction files that teach an AI coding assistant to follow Ankra’s practices: driving the CLI, authoring ImportCluster YAML, composing Stacks, taking a repository from source to production, encrypting secrets with SOPS, reviewing access, and supervising Ankra’s own AI agents. Once installed, your assistant applies them automatically - ask it to “get this service live on staging” and it reaches for the Ankra workflow instead of raw kubectl. The skills are embedded in the Ankra CLI, so installation works offline and the skill set is versioned with the CLI release.
These skills steer your editor or assistant. They are a different feature from AI Skills, which teach Ankra’s own AI your organisation’s conventions inside the platform.

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Install

With no flags, the CLI detects the assistants configured on your machine and installs into all of them. See what it found, and where each assistant’s skills land:
Target assistants explicitly with --client (repeatable, comma-separated, or all):

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Supported assistants

Assistants that discover SKILL.md files themselves get a plain skills directory. Every other assistant gets the skills in a shared library plus an index written into the file that assistant always loads - naming each skill, what it covers, and the path to open. The index is what makes the skills work in an assistant with no skills mechanism of its own.

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The Claude app

The Claude app cannot read your filesystem, so --client claude-app writes one uploadable bundle per skill instead:
Upload each .zip at claude.ai under Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill.

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Personal or per-repository

By default skills install for your user, available in every project. --project <dir> installs into a repository instead - the right scope for GitHub Copilot, whose instructions file is read per repository. Commit the result so the whole team gets it:
A repository-scoped install writes repository-relative paths, so the committed files work on every teammate’s machine.

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What gets installed

Skills - matched automatically against what you ask the assistant for. The set covers getting started, the CLI, importing and building clusters, domains and DNS, Stacks and add-ons, stack profiles, applications and CI/CD, GitOps, SOPS secrets, Helm registries, observability, troubleshooting, alerting, security, and Ankra’s AI agent surface. The Agent Skills Catalogue breaks down every skill and when your assistant reaches for it; ankra skills list prints the same from the CLI. Workflows - named entry points you invoke deliberately, for jobs that span several skills: Written in each assistant’s own command format. Skip them with --no-workflows. A rule that makes Ankra the default route for Kubernetes work: the assistant inspects read-only freely, but routes changes through the GitOps repository or ankra cluster apply instead of raw kubectl/helm. Skip it with --no-rules. A hook (opt-in, --with-hooks) that intercepts direct kubectl/helm cluster mutations in Claude Code and Cursor and pauses them for confirmation, pointing back at the Ankra workflow.

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Using the skills

Just ask - the assistant picks the right skills from the request:
  • “Get this repo deployed to staging and then production”
  • “Connect the API to our LiteLLM gateway”
  • “The payments pod is crashlooping”
  • “Set up a cluster on Hetzner and put our domain on it”
Or name one explicitly (“use ankra-stack-profiles”), or invoke a workflow (/ankra-triage). Restart the assistant after installing so it loads the new files.

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Update and uninstall

Skills ship inside the CLI binary, so updating is:
Removal undoes what install did - the skills, the rule, the index, the workflows and the hook:

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Command reference

Every flag and subcommand is in the CLI reference. The deprecated --editor flag still resolves as an alias for --client.