Documentation.A Handbook for the Registry.

OpenClaw Skills is a registry of installable techniques — modules — that an AI coding agent can load at runtime to acquire a capability it did not have on its own. Each module is a small, versioned document (a SKILL.md file and any supporting assets) maintained at github.com/openclaw/skills and distributed through the clawhub client.

A module is not a library and not a prompt. It is an edition: a particular way of performing a task, attested by a correspondent who found it useful, and typeset into the Registry so that other operators may install it by name. The document is the payload; the typography is ceremonial.

Five runtimes — openclaw, claude-code, codex, gemini-cli, and cursor — currently read the Registry, each through its own adapter. A module that typechecks in one runtime typechecks in all; the adapters only differ in where they expect the file to land on disk. See § 04.

Modules are installed with the clawhub client. The canonical form is clawhub install <author>/<slug> — author is the organisation or handle that published the module, slug is the module's short name. The client resolves the pair against the Registry, fetches the pinned commit of SKILL.md, writes it to the active runtime's skills directory, and appends an entry to the local manifest.

$ clawhub install openclaw/frontend-design
→ resolving openclaw/frontend-design  … ok→ runtime: claude-code  (~/.claude/skills)→ fetching SKILL.md @ 4b2f91c  … 14.2 kB→ writing ~/.claude/skills/frontend-design/SKILL.md→ updating manifest  … okinstalled  openclaw/frontend-design  v1.3.0attested   yes  (sha256:5a3e…)issued     14.iv.2026  ·  1 module

Where modules land § 2.1 · install paths

The install path is determined by the active runtime, not the client. clawhub refuses to write outside the runtime's declared skills directory; a module installed for one runtime is not visible to another without a second install. See § 04 for the full table.

Uninstalling § 2.2

clawhub uninstall <author>/<slug> removes the SKILL.md and its entry in the manifest; the attestation is retained on the Registry side, since it refers to the module's history, not your copy of it.

A SKILL.md is a Markdown document with a YAML frontmatter block. The frontmatter declares the module's identity and metadata; the body is the instructional text the agent loads. Four frontmatter fields are canonical — name, description, homepage, and the optional metadata map. Additional keys are permitted but ignored by the current readers.

---name: frontend-design
description: Commit to a bold aesthetic direction when designing
             interfaces outside an existing brand system.
homepage: https://openclaw.dev/m/frontend-design
metadata:
  class: technique
  runtimes: [openclaw, claude-code, codex]
  depends: []
---# Frontend design

Use this module when you are designing an interface without
a brand to inherit from — a prototype, a personal site, a
greenfield tool. Commit to a single, legible aesthetic
direction rather than averaging three at once.

Five coding agents currently read the Registry. Each has its own adapter — a short shim that tells clawhub where to place a module and how the agent will discover it on load. Adapters are versioned independently of modules; a module that worked against the v1 adapter will continue to work under v2.

A module declares which runtimes it has been attested against in metadata.runtimes. The declaration is informational: clawhub will install under any listed runtime and will warn, not refuse, when installing under an unlisted one.

New modules are contributed by pull request against openclaw/skills. The Academy reviews contributions for correspondence, not novelty — a module may cover the same ground as an existing one so long as the technique is its own. The full workflow, in five steps:

1. Draft in isolation

   Write the SKILL.md in a scratch directory on your own workstation. Include the four frontmatter fields; omit metadata.runtimes until step three.

2. Attest the draft

   Run clawhub attest ./SKILL.md. The client typechecks the frontmatter, computes the sha256 of the body, and prints a draft attestation id. No network call yet.

3. Field-test against a runtime

   Install the draft locally with clawhub install --local ./ and exercise it against at least one runtime. Note which runtimes you tested and add them to metadata.runtimes.

4. Open a pull request

   Fork openclaw/skills, commit your module under modules/<your-handle>/<slug>/, and open a PR. A short rationale in the PR body — what you tried, what you kept — is useful to the reviewer.

5. Typesetting & issuance

   Once merged, the module is typeset into the next dispatch. The attestation is recorded; your handle is added to the colophon if you consent. From this point the module is installable by name.

Every installed module is accompanied by a _meta.json file in its directory. The manifest records the version installed, the commit it was drawn from, the date of publication, and the short history of prior revisions. Versioning is semantic — major, minor, patch — and is set by the author, not the client.

{
  "name": "openclaw/frontend-design",
  "version": "1.3.0",
  "commit": "4b2f91c",
  "published": "2026-04-14T09:22:00Z",
  "sha256": "5a3e…c17",
  "runtimes": ["openclaw", "claude-code", "codex"],
  "history": [
    { "version": "1.2.1", "commit": "c9d11a0", "published": "2026-02-28" },
    { "version": "1.2.0", "commit": "7a41e03", "published": "2026-01-19" },
    { "version": "1.1.0", "commit": "22c8f9b", "published": "2025-11-03" }
  ]
}

clawhub update <slug> compares the local commit against the Registry's pinned commit and fetches the newer SKILL.md if one exists. The older entry is not removed from the manifest's history — the module remembers what it was.

Corrections to a published module are recorded as errata against the version they fix, not as a new version, until enough have accumulated to warrant a patch release. Each errata entry carries a short reason, the attributable handle (where permission is given), and the date it was lodged.

To submit: open a pull request against the module titled errata: <one-line reason>. The reviewer prints accepted errata in the margin of the next dispatch and credits the submitter in the colophon. Rejected errata are replied to in correspondence and retained in the PR history; they are not printed.

The Registry exposes several machine-readable surfaces so that other clients and agents may read it without parsing these pages. All three live under the canonical domain and are rebuilt on each typeset.

These surfaces are informational and will be wired to real files in a later pass. A client reading /manifest.json today will receive a snapshot from the last typeset; read it as of its date, not as of the request.

— end of Book 02 —