How to Install a Custom Hermes Skill from GitHub

A developer published a guide on installing custom Hermes skills from GitHub, detailing a workflow to copy a SKILL.md file into ~/.hermes/skills without requiring a separate registration command. The post includes steps for downloading, verifying, and running the skill, as well as automating it with cron. The guide aims to reduce trial and error for users.

This guide walks through a tested end-to-end workflow: copy a custom SKILL.md from GitHub into ~/.hermes/skills, confirm it shows up, run it, and optionally automate it. Hermes does not require a separate register or install command for that layout. I published a custom SKILL.md on GitHub and wanted a dependable installation path for Hermes. After reading several docs without finding a single operational narrative, I ran through the procedure with an AI assistant and captured the result here. This article is the cleaned-up version of that session so you can repeat the same steps with less trial and error. Shell examples below were validated in a real environment; substitute your repo, path, branch, and local skill slug where indicated. Original ask to the assistant: i’ve written a customSKILL.mdthat has been published at my Github account. Please guide me how to install it either through chat here or in command line What the session covered: The source repo: https://github.com/j3ffyang/ai-custom-skills https://github.com/j3ffyang/ai-custom-skills You need two things before copying into ~/.hermes/skills: The example below uses one of my own custom SKILL.md files. Download to a staging directory, then install §2 : mkdir -p /tmp/hermes-skillcurl -sL -o /tmp/hermes-skill/SKILL.md \ "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/j3ffyang/ai-custom-skills/main/hermes/ai-newsletter-prompt/SKILL.md" Clone alternative: If you use git clone, copy SKILL.md from the working tree with cp instead of curl — handy for private repos or when you want sibling files next to the skill. Copy SKILL.md into ~/.hermes/skills/<skill-name /SKILL.md. That is the whole install: Hermes loads skills from this directory and does not need an extra CLI step to register a local custom skill. In this example the slug is ai-newsletter-daily, so the path is ~/.hermes/skills/ai-newsletter-daily/SKILL.md. Run: hermes skills list The custom skill should appear in the output. hermes skills list Installed Skills ┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┓┃ Name ┃ Category ┃ Source ┃ Trust ┃ Status ┃┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━┩│ ai-newsletter-daily │ │ local │ local │ enabled │ If you install a skill only by copying it under ~/.hermes/skills, hermes skills inspect does not cover that local skill, so you cannot use inspect to verify required environment variables or related metadata. The example SKILL.md used here does not define required environment variables in the file. Runtime keys still depend on what the skill actually calls; set them from the prose in SKILL.md, your README, or your own notes. For ai-newsletter-daily you need: Persist these in your shell profile ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, etc. or export them in the session where Hermes runs. export BRAVE API KEY=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxexport FIRECRAWL API KEY=yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy Hermes routes user intent to skills from both the terminal UI and bridged chat apps. You do not need a special syntax unless your deployment or bridge defines one. Hermes TUI Messaging channels e.g. WhatsApp, Telegram If the skill does not run To generate and deliver output on a schedule for example a daily newsletter , wire a Hermes cron job or an external scheduler that invokes the same workflow you use interactively. Exact flags depend on your Hermes version and channel setup; use hermes — help and your install docs for cron-specific syntax. Re-fetch the raw SKILL.md §1 , replace the file under ~/.hermes/skills/<skill-name /SKILL.md, then confirm with hermes skills list. How to Install a Custom Hermes Skill from GitHub https://blog.devgenius.io/how-to-install-a-custom-hermes-skill-from-github-c9ee50494bfb was originally published in Dev Genius https://blog.devgenius.io on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.