In the DeepSeek Harness (DSH) development workflow, managing Agent skill packages (SKILL.md) usually involves manual downloading, extraction, and path configuration. dsh-plug-skills provides a centralized management interface that allows users to directly browse Agent Skills repositories on GitHub in the Web UI, view details, and then install or remove them with one click.

Core Features

Discover and Browse

The plugin provides searching in the Web UI under “Settings → Plugins → Skills”. It supports searching by GitHub Topics, including agent-skills, dsh-skill, claude-skills, ai-skills, skills, and skill. Search results can be sorted by star count or most recent update, and pagination is supported.

Additionally, the plugin provides fuzzy matching options: *skills and *skill. The former searches topics such as agent-skills, ai-skills, claude-skills, and skills in parallel and removes duplicates; the latter searches dsh-skill and skill. Note that fuzzy matching consumes 2-4 anonymous search quotas and may be subject to rate limiting.

Skill Details and Installation

Click a repository to view details, including star count, Topics, license, and the repository’s Markdown README. The plugin recursively scans all SKILL.md files in the repository and parses their Frontmatter (including name and description).

After users select the skill packages to install, click Install. The skill is extracted and copied to $DSH_HOME/skills/<directory-name>. Installation supports batch installation, duplicate name detection, and optional overwrite. Thanks to the skill-filesystem plugin, installed skills take effect immediately without restarting DSH.

Installed Skill Management

In the “Installed” tab, you can view all skills under $DSH_HOME/skills and $DSH_AGENTS_HOME/skills. The interface displays the skill summary, source repository, and whether it was installed by this plugin. To remove a skill, confirm in the interface; related directories are cleaned up accordingly.

Proxy Configuration

Due to network environment restrictions, the plugin supports multiple ways to configure a GitHub proxy. The default is a direct connection (using Node fetch). After configuring a proxy, requests are made through the system curl, supporting the http, https, socks5, socks5h, and socks4 protocols.

Proxy configuration is applied by priority:
1. Persistent settings: Enter the address in the “GitHub Proxy” field in the Web UI and click Apply; the configuration is written to $DSH_HOME/plug-skills.json.
2. Plugin configuration: Set config.proxy in the profile’s cordis.patch.yml.
3. Environment variables: Set DSH_PLUG_SKILLS_PROXY, or the standard HTTPS_PROXY, HTTP_PROXY, ALL_PROXY.

The UI provides a connection test feature that requests api.github.com/zen to verify latency. The special value direct can force a direct connection.

Installation and Enabling

The plugin is installed via npm. It requires the host environment to have curl (included by default on macOS/Linux) and pnpm.

dsh plugin --profile web add -w dsh-plug-skills

After installation is complete, restart DSH (dsh web) to load the new bundle. Then the “Skills” tab is available under “Settings → Plugins”.

Security and Data Notes

Security: Skills are essentially prompt-level content. Once loaded, they enter the model context directly, equivalent to user-written system instructions. It is recommended to install only skill packages from trusted sources. Installation and removal operations are triggered by users in the local UI, and the host process performs file operations directly.

Data storage: Skill directories are located under $DSH_HOME/skills. Installation records are saved in $DSH_HOME/plug-skills.json.

Limitations: Recursive scanning has a character limit (default 100,000 characters, separately relaxed to 3,000,000). Local API endpoints are restricted to loopback address access only.

Conclusion

dsh-plug-skills centralizes the management of skill packages distributed across GitHub, enabling skill discovery, installation, and hot reloading through simple clicks, which lowers the barrier to Agent development and maintenance.