Skill-Cortex (Lite Edition) is a third-party MCP (Model Context Protocol) server used to give all IDEs the capabilities of Claude Code Skills.
Purpose It serves as a bridge layer between IDEs and Claude Code Skills, providing skill discovery, indexing, and retrieval capabilities through the MCP protocol, so that non-Claude environments can also use the SKILL.md-based skill system.
Main capabilities
- Skill discovery and indexing: automatically scans and indexes SKILL.md files from multiple sources.
- Flexible configuration: supports custom skill root directories and cache paths.
- Tag management: built-in tag validation and management system.
- Skill tree navigation: browse skills hierarchically by category.
- Search function: full-text search across all indexed skills.
- Skill details: retrieve detailed information for each skill.
- Context compression: extract skill content by section to save token consumption.
- Enhanced import tool: advanced import script with configuration files, progress tracking, and error handling.
MCP tools
- list_skill_tree: browse skills in a hierarchical tree structure, with parameter path (optional, starting path of the skill tree).
- search_skills: search skills by query text, with parameters query (optional) and tags (optional, array of tags used for filtering).
- get_skill_details: get details for a specific skill and support context compression, with parameters skill_id (required), section (optional, summary/instructions/examples/full, default summary), max_lines (optional, limit the number of output lines).
- update_tags: manage tags in skills frontmatter, with parameter mode (required, list or apply); when applying, updates must be provided.
- create_new_skill: create a new skill and automatically validate and index it, with parameters including path (required), description (required, 1-1024 characters), tags, instructions, license, metadata, and whether to create scripts/references/assets directories. Skill creationin the .skills/ directory, the name must be lowercase letters and hyphens, and category paths are supported.
- delete_existing_skill: delete a user-created skill, with parameters skill_id (required) and confirm (required, only True will actually delete). Only skills in the .skills/ directory are allowed to be deleted; imported skills (.skills/imported/) or source repository skills (.skill_cortex_sources/) cannot be deleted.
Usage Prerequisites: Python 3.11 or later, pip package manager. After installation, run the server to use it through MCP integration; place skills in ~/.claude/skills or ./.skills.
Configuration Environment variables:
- SKILL_CORTEX_ROOTS: comma-separated list of skill root directories, default ~/.claude/skills,./.skills.
- SKILL_CORTEX_CACHE_PATH: index cache file path, default ./.skill_cortex_cache/index.json.
- SKILL_CORTEX_TAGS_PATH: allowed tags file path, default ./tags.md.
Importing skills The project includes an enhanced import script that supports YAML/JSON configuration files, automatically finds skills-config.yaml, skills-config.yml, or skills-config.json in the current directory, and can also use --config to specify a custom configuration; it supports real-time progress, skill counts, summary reports, continue on error, detailed error reports, error classification, dry-run previews, and more. The import script imports skills into ./.skill_cortex_sources/ and copies them to ./.skills/imported/. Importable public repository sources include AI agent skill collections, the Anthropic official skills repository, community-curated Claude Skills resource collections, Hugging Face skills repositories, and more.
Use cases Suitable for developers who want to uniformly browse, retrieve, create, and manage Claude Code Skills in any IDE or CLI; and for teams that need to browse skills by category, full-text search skills, control context consumption, or batch import public skills..
Limitations
- This repository does not include skills by default; you need to place them yourself or pull them via an import script.
- Deletion operations have strict scope limits and require explicit confirmation.
- Tags must be within the allowed tag file and are case-sensitive.
- For troubleshooting, situations such as module not found, skills not displayed, tag validation errors, and import script errors may occur; you need to check the configuration, cache, and repository accessibility.
- The license is MIT.
