pollen

Deploy Agent Skills from git repositories, local
directories and well-known discovery indexes, declaratively, from a single
pollen.yaml.

Description

pollen is a small CLI that reads a pollen.yaml describing where your
skills come from — git repositories pinned to a revision, directories next
to the config file, or origins publishing a well-known discovery index such as
a LiteLLM gateway — and makes your skills directories match it: it installs
what is declared, refreshes what moved, and removes what you dropped. The file
is shaped after pre-commit's: a list of repos, each with a revision and the
paths to pull from.

Out of the box it deploys to both .claude/skills/, which Claude Code
reads, and .agents/skills/, the cross-client convention every other Agent
Skills client scans — so one pollen update serves Claude Code, Cursor,
Codex, Antigravity CLI, Copilot, OpenCode and the rest without configuring
anything. A skill folder that also carries a .claude-plugin/plugin.json is
copied whole, so plugin-shaped skills keep working too.

What it is not: a registry, a package manager with dependency resolution, or a
skill authoring tool. It moves directories that already exist and validates
them against the specification.

See ARCHITECTURE.md for the design and the reasoning behind
it.

Getting started

The full documentation lives at https://groupbees.github.io/pollen/, and
https://groupbees.github.io/pollen/llms.txt is its entry point for language
models.

Prerequisites

• git, on PATH.

Installation

With Homebrew, on macOS and Linux:

brew install groupbees/tap/pollen

Otherwise, download the archive for your platform from the
releases and put pollen on
your PATH, or build it from source with Rust ≥ 1.97.1:

cargo install --git https://github.com/groupbees/pollen

With Python ≥ 3.11, the pollen-skills package carries the same engine: it
installs the pollen command, and a Python API with typed results rather than
printed ones:

uv tool install pollen-skills   # or: pipx install pollen-skills

Where a policy blocks unsigned executables, python -m pollen runs the same
command through the Python interpreter.

See Installation
for the platforms and the checksums, and
Python for the API.

Configuration

A pollen.yaml in the working directory lists where the skills come from:

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/toto/tata
    revision: 1.2.3
    paths:
      - path: mydir/
  - repo: local
    paths:
      - path: skills

To see what a source provides before adding it — each skill's path and
description, and the commit to pin:

pollen show https://github.com/groupbees/skills-opensource

Every key is in the
configuration reference,
and every option's
environment variable
too.

Usage

Deploy everything the config declares:

pollen update

The other commands are in
Usage, and the pre-commit
hook that validates a pollen.yaml in
Pre-commit hook.

Pinning, and why there is no lockfile

Pin each source to the commit of a release and keep the tag in a comment:

revision: 4e1e8e25a2f32d8311cd52c5d9a703bad990e525  # v0.2.0

A commit cannot move, and pollen resolves no version ranges and no transitive
dependencies, so the pinned pollen.yaml is the lock — no separate lockfile.
pollen autoupdate --freeze bumps the pins, pollen outdated shows newer
releases, and pollen validate --pinned enforces the convention.

Teach your agents pollen

pollen ships an Agent Skill, skills/pollen, so the
agents in your projects know how to edit a pollen.yaml, pin a source and fix
pollen's errors. Install it with pollen itself:

  - repo: https://github.com/groupbees/pollen
    revision: <sha>  # vX.Y.Z
    paths:
      - path: skills

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.