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List installed skills

Source: R/installed_skills.R
installed_skills.Rd

Finds every skill on the computer that an agent can load, not just the ones ally installed. It looks in the shared .agents/skills/ folder and in each agent's own folder (.claude/skills/, .codex/skills/, .cursor/skills/), for the project, your home folder, or both. A folder counts as a skill when it holds a SKILL.md, whether it is a real folder or a link to one.

Usage

installed_skills(scope = c("project", "user"), check_github = TRUE)

Arguments

scope

Where to look: "project" (the working directory), "user" (your home folder), or both, the default.

check_github

If TRUE, the default, look up when each GitHub skill last changed. Set to FALSE to skip the lookup, when offline for instance.

Value

A tibble with one row per skill and columns:

  • name: the skill's folder name.

  • description: the start of the description from the SKILL.md header, which agents read to decide when to use the skill. The full text is in the SKILL.md at path.

  • installed_by: "ally", "skills CLI", or NA when nothing recorded it.

  • installed_from: the GitHub repository and folder, local path or link target the skill was installed from, such as "posit-dev/skills/r-lib/r-cli-app", or NA when nothing recorded it.

  • installed: when this copy was installed or last updated, in your time zone.

  • updated_on_github: when the skill's folder last changed on GitHub, or NA for skills that did not come from GitHub.

  • edited: TRUE if any copy of the skill has changed since ally installed it, FALSE if none has, or NA when there is nothing to compare with: skills ally did not install, or installed before it recorded a fingerprint of each skill's files. update_skill() will not overwrite an edited skill without force = TRUE.

  • scope: "project" or "user".

  • found_in: the folders that hold the skill, such as ".agents, .claude".

  • path: the skill's folder, preferring the .agents/skills/ copy.

Details

A skill that sits in several folders (the .agents/skills/ copy and the Claude Code copy ally makes, for instance) is listed once, with every folder it was found in.

What installed a skill, where from, and when come from the first of these that records it: the .ally-source.json that install_skill() writes, or the lockfile the skills command-line tool (npx skills) keeps at .agents/.skill-lock.json. A skill that is a link to a folder elsewhere shows that folder as where it came from. Skills copied in by hand have none of this, so their install time is when their folder was created.

For skills installed from GitHub, installed_skills() also looks up when the skill's folder last changed there, using the repository's public commit feed. That needs no token and does not count against the GitHub API rate limit. If that time is later than installed, update_skill() will fetch a newer version.

Skills that come from Claude Code plugins live elsewhere and are not listed.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
installed_skills()
installed_skills(scope = "user", check_github = FALSE)
} # }