Validation Workflow

Plugin Validation Workflow

CI/CD pipeline for validating skills and auto-generating marketplace.

Overview

| Item | Details | | ------ | --------- | | Date | 2025-12-29 | | Objective | Automate skill validation and marketplace generation | | Outcome | Consistent quality, auto-updated discoverability |

When to Use

• Setting up CI/CD for a skills marketplace
• Enforcing required sections in SKILL.md
• Auto-generating marketplace.json on merge
• Preventing low-quality skills from entering registry

Verified Workflow

1. PR Validation

CI runs python3 scripts/validate_plugins.py skills/ plugins/ on every PR touching skills/**, plugins/**, templates/**, or scripts/validate_plugins.py.

What it checks (scripts/validate_plugins.py):

• .claude-plugin/plugin.json exists with name, version, description
• Name matches ^[a-z0-9-]+$
• Description ≥ 20 chars
• Category valid if present (9 approved values)
• SKILL.md has YAML frontmatter (---)
• Required sections: Overview, When to Use, Verified Workflow, Failed Attempts, Results
• Failed Attempts has table format (pipe characters)

Run locally before committing:

python3 scripts/validate_plugins.py skills/

2. Auto-Generate Marketplace on Merge

On push to main (paths: skills/**, plugins/**), CI runs:

python3 scripts/generate_marketplace.py .claude-plugin/marketplace.json skills/ plugins/

Result is committed with [skip ci] to prevent infinite loops.

3. Install Scripts

Copy from this plugin's scripts/ directory:

• validate_plugins.py — PR validation
• generate_marketplace.py — Marketplace generation

Failed Attempts

| Attempt | Why Failed | Lesson | | --------- | ----------- | -------- | | No validation on PRs | Bad plugins entered registry | Validate before merge | | Manual marketplace.json edits | Out of sync with actual plugins | Auto-generate on merge | | Optional failures section | Most valuable info missing | Make it required in validation | | Single validation script | Hard to debug which check failed | Separate steps in workflow | | Inline grep validation | Missed edge cases, hard to maintain | Use dedicated validate_plugins.py |

Results & Parameters

# Validation rules (from validate_plugins.py)
validation:
  required_plugin_fields:
    - name
    - version
    - description
  min_description_length: 20
  description_must_contain: "Use when:"
  required_skill_sections:
    - "## Failed Attempts"
    - "## When to Use"

# Workflow triggers
triggers:
  validate_on: pull_request (paths: skills/**, plugins/**, templates/**, scripts/validate_plugins.py)
  generate_on: push to main (paths: skills/**, plugins/**)

# Commit message patterns
commits:
  marketplace_update: "chore: update marketplace.json [skip ci]"
  skip_ci_pattern: "[skip ci]"  # Prevent infinite loops

References

• GitHub Actions: https://docs.github.com/en/actions
• Key insight: "Auto-update marketplace makes skills discoverable to /plugin system"

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: HomericIntelligence
• Source: HomericIntelligence/ProjectMnemosyne
• License: BSD-3-Clause

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.