mdm skills install

Restore skills from skills-lock.json.

Usage

mdm skills install

Reads the lock file and re-installs every recorded skill from its original source. Intended for CI pipelines and onboarding — run it after cloning a repo to get all skills back without having to remember each package source.

How it works

mdm looks for skills in both the project lock (skills-lock.json) and the global lock (~/.agents/skills-lock.json):

Situation	Behaviour
Only project lock has skills	Restores project skills silently
Only global lock has skills	Explains the situation and asks to confirm before restoring
Both locks have skills	Prompts you to choose which lock to restore from
Neither lock has skills	Prints a message and exits

With --yes, the project lock is preferred and no prompts are shown.

Skills are re-installed by calling mdm skills add for each recorded source, grouped by origin so repos are only fetched once. Each restored skill is scanned for hidden Unicode characters before files are copied or symlinked.

Flags

Flag	Description
--yes, -y	Skip prompts; default to project lock when both exist
--allow-hidden-chars	Allow markdown files with hidden Unicode characters

Examples

# Restore all project skills after cloning a repo
mdm skills install

# CI — restore without any prompts
mdm skills install -y

# Restore even if a skill intentionally contains hidden characters
mdm skills install -y --allow-hidden-chars

CI usage

Add skills-lock.json to version control, then restore in your CI setup:

# GitHub Actions example
- name: Restore skills
  run: mdm skills install -y