Install and use Agent Skills

The user and in-cluster modes of olares-cli are built for AI agents rather than interactive use. To support this, olares-cli includes a set of Agent Skill bundles, one per group of commands. Each bundle teaches an agent what each command does, which flags matter, how authentication works, and how to recover from common errors.

Understand Agent Skills

An Agent Skill is a SKILL.md bundle that an AI runtime loads as a tool definition. When the agent receives a natural-language request like "list the files in my Olares Home folder", it consults the loaded skill to find the corresponding command (olares-cli files ls /drive/Home), and runs it on your behalf.

The bundles are located in cli/skills/ in the Olares repository. Each bundle contains a SKILL.md and a references/ folder. SKILL.md carries routing logic, cross-cutting concepts, and an error-to-fix matrix. references/ holds one file per non-trivial subcommand for details that are too long for SKILL.md but not in --help.

Available Agent Skills

Skill	Description
olares-shared	Log in to Olares, manage profiles and tokens, and recover from auth errors. Load this skill first.
olares-chart	Turn your own repo, docker-compose, or Helm chart into an Olares app and deploy it.
olares-files	Manage Olares files: upload, download, compress, extract, share, and mount SMB/NFS. Covers drive, sync, cache, and external namespaces.
olares-market	Install, upgrade, uninstall, clone, stop, resume, and restart Olares apps; browse the catalog; check status; and upload local charts.
olares-settings	Change Olares settings such as users, apps, VPN, network, backup, integrations, GPU, and search.
olares-dashboard	View system resource usage including CPU, memory, disk, network, pods, GPU, fan, and application ranking.
olares-cluster	Inspect K8s runtime state including pods, containers, workloads, jobs, cronjobs, nodes, and middleware. Read logs, exec, scale, restart, and suspend/resume cronjobs.
olares-doctor	Find out why an app is broken, such as stuck installs, crashes, image pull failures, running-but-unreachable apps, or slowdowns. Pulls evidence from cluster, dashboard, and market.
olares-router	Configure and use AI models: add a cloud vendor's models, install a local model app, pick the defaults, issue keys and quotas, read usage, and call a model for chat, embeddings, transcription, speech, or OCR.
olares-knowledge	Download to Olares: create, inspect, pause, and cancel URL, yt-dlp, aria2, torrent, and Hugging Face tasks, including the ones Wise starts.
olares-search	Search files and apps. Full-content search across Drive files and Sync libraries, plus search installed apps by title.
olares-publish	Publish an app that already runs locally to the public Olares Market: release targets, listing metadata, icon and screenshots.

Always install olares-shared first

All other bundles assume olares-shared is already loaded. It owns the profile model, the token refresh logic, and the auth-error recovery hints that the other skills rely on. An agent that loads only olares-files, for example, encounters auth errors with no recovery path.

Install the skills manually

If you set up the CLI with npx @olares/cli@latest install, the skills are already installed and you can skip this step.

Otherwise, have the CLI write them out:

olares-cli skills install

The bundles are compiled into the binary, so this reads no network and fetches no version: what lands on disk is what the olares-cli you just ran was built from. One copy goes to ~/.agents/skills, and every agent skills directory that already exists on the machine — Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw — is linked to it. Directories are never created for an agent you don't have. The agent then loads the matching skill when you mention an Olares task, and because olares-shared is written along with the rest, the shared-first requirement is satisfied automatically.

If olares-cli is not on the machine yet, install it first — the skills come with it.

TIP

The skills are also listed on ClawHub, but that copy predates the move into the binary and is no longer updated. Install from the CLI instead; a registry copy has no way to tell you it disagrees with the verbs your binary actually has.

Some AI agent apps on Olares bundle these skills, so the agent can manage Olares out of the box. To use the skills from such an app, see Manage Olares with your Hermes Agent or Manage Olares with your OpenClaw agent.

Update the skills

olares-cli and the Agent Skills are updated frequently. When a new version is available, use the path that matches your setup.

Update skills bundled with an Olares agent app

AI agent apps on Olares, such as OpenCode and Hermes Agent, ship with the Olares CLI Agent Skills built in. Updating the app also updates the bundled skills. You don't need to run any extra CLI commands.

Update locally installed skills

Update olares-cli first (how), then run the install command again:

olares-cli skills install

The skills come from the binary, so this order matters: the new CLI writes the skills that document it, replacing each bundle whole. Updating the CLI on its own leaves the previous skills in place, which is why every command other than skills prints one line on standard error while the two disagree. Set OLARES_CLI_NO_SKILL_NOTICE=1 to silence that line where extra output can't be tolerated.

TIP

You can also ask your AI agent to run these commands for you.

Use the skills

Once the bundles are loaded, control Olares with natural language. The agent determines which CLI command to run. For example:

# List files using the olares-files skill
List the files in the Home folder on my Olares device

# Install an app using the olares-market skill
Install Firefox from Market and tell me when it's ready

# Check resource usage using the olares-dashboard skill
Show me which apps are using more than 1 GB of memory

TIP

If the agent doesn't load the Olares skills, explicitly invoke them with a slash (/) command.