Introduction

DeepSeek Harness (DSH) adopts a plugin-based architecture. During use, directly operating files or configurations often leads to confusion between the “file enabled” and “available in current session” states, and makes it difficult to uniformly manage the lifecycle of Skills. dsh-skill-manager intervenes in the Settings page through official extension points, providing an independent Skill management solution without modifying the core Harness workflow.

What It Is

dsh-skill-manager is a non-invasive Skill lifecycle manager plugin. It is maintained by user mhdfy1988 and is designed to manage user skill directories supported by the official filesystem Skill provider, addressing state tracking and file management issues during Skill installation, updating, and uninstallation.

Core Features

  1. View session-available Skills: In the “Settings → Skills” page, view the Skills actually callable in the currently selected session through the official skill.list interface.
  2. Local installation: Supports installing Skills containing SKILL.md from local folders or ZIP packages.
  3. Lifecycle management: Perform update, enable, disable, and uninstall operations on Skills installed by the manager.
  4. Separate state display: The interface displays “session-available Skills” and “manager-owned user Skills” separately to avoid confusion between file enablement status and actual invocation results.
  5. Safe operation mechanism:
    • Install refuses to overwrite Skills with the same name.
    • Automatically backs up the old version before updating, then replaces it with the new version.
    • Uninstall moves files to the manager recycle area instead of permanently deleting them directly.
  6. Low invasiveness: The official filesystem Skill provider handles hot refresh; normal Skill operations do not modify the Profile and do not require a Harness restart.

Installation and Enablement

The plugin is installed through the official dsh plugin process. After installation, Harness must be restarted.

dsh plugin --profile web add D:\deepseek\dsh-skill-manager\artifacts\dsh-skill-manager-0.1.4.tgz

After restarting dsh web, go to “Settings → Skills” to see the management interface.

Typical Usage

Skill Package Format

A Skill package can be a folder or a ZIP file and must contain SKILL.md. The SKILL.md file must declare a name field (lowercase kebab-case). After installation, the directory name will be normalized to name.

Example structure:

my-skill/
├─ SKILL.md
├─ references/
└─ scripts/

SKILL.md Example

---
name: my-skill
description: 何时使用这个技能
---

# 使用说明
...

Applicable Scenarios and Notes

Applicable to: DSH developers or administrators who need to frequently manage, test, or maintain custom Skills.

Important boundaries:
1. Management scope: The manager only owns Skill directories marked with .dsh-skill-manager.json. Project Skills, manually installed user Skills (located in <DSH_HOME>\skills), .agents Skills, preset built-in Skills, and Skills provided by other plugins are not managed by this manager.
2. State priority: The page’s “current session available skills” directly reuses the official result and is read-only; “enabled in the user directory” only indicates that the file exists and does not guarantee that it takes precedence in the session (same-name Skills in the project or presets may override it according to official priority rules).
3. Plugin installation: The manager plugin itself is still installed, updated, or removed through the official process, and Harness must be restarted after installation.
4. First-version limitations: Installation from GitHub URLs, online marketplaces, automatic update sources, a graphical restoration interface, batch enumeration across historical sessions, and management of arbitrary plugins are not yet supported.

Conclusion

dsh-skill-manager provides a lightweight Skill management tool for the DSH plugin ecosystem. Through clear separation and safe lifecycle operations, it simplifies Skill maintenance. For more details, refer to the project homepage or user manual.