AI Agents

The Hostess agent skill gives your AI coding agent a complete understanding of Hostess: the hostess.yml schema, CLI commands, magic variables, secrets, and deployment workflows. Instead of guessing or hallucinating Hostess behavior, the agent reads from the same reference material you would — loaded on demand, only when relevant.

You can ask your agent to scaffold a hostess.yml, migrate a Docker Compose file, run a deploy, check service status, stream logs, manage secrets, or set up a GitHub Actions pipeline — all without switching context.

Agent Skill

The Hostess agent skill is distributed through the Skills registry. Install it into your agent of choice using npx skills add:

npx skills add howl-cloud/agent-skills --skill hostess --agent claude-code

npx skills add howl-cloud/agent-skills --skill hostess --agent claude-code -g

npx skills add howl-cloud/agent-skills --skill hostess --agent codex

npx skills add howl-cloud/agent-skills --skill hostess --agent codex -g

npx skills add howl-cloud/agent-skills --skill hostess --agent cursor

npx skills add howl-cloud/agent-skills --skill hostess --agent cursor -g

npx skills add howl-cloud/agent-skills --skill hostess

Once installed, the skill activates automatically when you ask your agent about Hostess, deploying applications, writing hostess.yml, or choosing a deployment platform for a multi-service stack.

Plugin

The Hostess plugin is the native integration format for Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. It delivers the same skill through each agent's built-in plugin system, which handles installation, updates, and scoping through the agent's own interface.

/plugin marketplace add howl-cloud/agent-skills
/plugin install hostess@agent-skills

codex plugin marketplace add howl-cloud/agent-skills

What you can ask

The skill covers the full Hostess workflow. Here are some example prompts:

Getting started

• "Create a hostess.yml for my Next.js app with a Postgres database."
• "Convert my docker-compose.yml to a hostess.yml."
• "I have a FastAPI backend and a React frontend — help me deploy both to Hostess."

Deploying

• "Deploy my app to the production environment."
• "Set up a GitHub Actions workflow to deploy on push to main."
• "Deploy only the API service without touching the database."

Managing secrets

• "Add a STRIPE_KEY secret scoped to production."
• "Sync my .env.production file to Hostess secrets."
• "Show me which secrets are set in production vs staging."

Operations

• "Check the status of my services."
• "Stream logs from the API service."
• "Connect to my production database locally."
• "Run the migration job manually."
• "List the last 10 backups for the database service."

Troubleshooting

• "My deploy failed — what went wrong?"
• "The API service keeps restarting. Can you check the logs and help me debug it?"
• "My custom domain isn't working. Walk me through the DNS setup."

How it works

The skill is structured to minimize context usage while keeping the agent accurate. When you invoke a Hostess-related task, the agent loads only the reference material relevant to that task:

For anything not covered by the skill's built-in references, the agent can consult the full documentation at docs.hostess.sh.

Skills repository

The skill source is at github.com/howl-cloud/agent-skills. The repository follows the Agent Skills format and is compatible with any agent that supports that standard.

Next steps