OpenJCockpit

Skills Hub and the local Skills Marketplace double (opt-in, dev-only)

Agents can be equipped with skills: reusable instruction packages in the Agent Skills format (skills/<id>/SKILL.md, with optional text references). Skills for configuration-driven agents live next to the agent definitions in services/embabel-agent-service/agent-definitions/skills/. A skill never grants tools: allowed-tools in a skill and text in instructions are ignored for tool access. See A2A and configuration-driven agents.

The dashboard’s Skills Hub can additionally list skills from external Skills Marketplace connections. That marketplace integration is an early, placeholder contract, described below.

Marketplace connections

The ai-control-service can list skills from registered “Skills Marketplace” connections (Skills Hub settings page) via GET /api/skill-catalog, using an invented placeholder wire contract: GET {marketplaceUrl}/skills returning a JSON array of {name, description} objects, authenticated with Authorization: Bearer <apiKey>. No real marketplace vendor exists yet, so this repository ships a tiny fake marketplace (nginx serving a static skills.json) purely so a developer can click through the feature by hand. It is test/dev-only infrastructure: it has no build context, is not part of the default docker compose up, is not referenced by any production code path or seed data, and is not required by any automated test (those use an in-process HTTP double instead).

Starting it

The mock is defined in a separate, never-auto-merged overlay file (docker-compose.local-marketplace.yml, not docker-compose.override.yml). It only starts when you explicitly add it with a second -f:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.local-marketplace.yml up

Alternatively: ./scripts/stack-start.sh --with-local-marketplace.

A plain docker compose up (no overlay) never starts mock-skills-marketplace and never touches the egress guard described below; the default startup path is unchanged.

SKILLS_MARKETPLACE_* environment variables

These configure the ai-control-service outbound call to any registered marketplace (real or mock). All have safe defaults and none are required for normal operation:

Variable Default Meaning
SKILLS_MARKETPLACE_REQUEST_TIMEOUT_SECONDS 5 Overall per-marketplace request deadline, in seconds.
SKILLS_MARKETPLACE_CONNECT_TIMEOUT_SECONDS 2 TCP connect timeout, in seconds.
SKILLS_MARKETPLACE_MAX_RESPONSE_BYTES 262144 Maximum response body size (bytes) before the read is aborted.
SKILLS_MARKETPLACE_MAX_ITEMS 500 Maximum number of skill items accepted from one marketplace response.
SKILLS_MARKETPLACE_MAX_REDIRECTS 1 Maximum number of HTTP redirects followed.
SKILLS_MARKETPLACE_MAX_CONNECTIONS_PER_FETCH 25 Maximum number of marketplace connections queried in one fetch cycle.
SKILLS_MARKETPLACE_ALLOW_PRIVATE_EGRESS false Deny-by-default egress guard opt-out for loopback/RFC1918/link-local/private destinations. See the warning below.

Trying it out against the mock

  1. Start the stack with the overlay (command above).
  2. Open the dashboard, go to the Skills Hub settings page, and register a new marketplace connection by hand:
    • Marketplace URL: http://mock-skills-marketplace/
    • API key: dev-mock-marketplace-key (the fixed, obviously-fake dev credential the mock checks for; see infrastructure/mock-skills-marketplace/nginx.conf. It is never a real secret and must never be reused anywhere else)
  3. Enable the connection, then open the Skills tab. The mock’s skills.json fixture (infrastructure/mock-skills-marketplace/skills.json) is returned as that connection’s skill catalogue. An incorrect or missing API key gets a 401 from the mock, which the feature reports as an authentication failure.

No connection pointing at the mock is seeded anywhere. You must register it yourself through the settings UI.

Warning: SKILLS_MARKETPLACE_ALLOW_PRIVATE_EGRESS must never be set in any deployed environment

This flag exists solely so the feature can be exercised against a marketplace that resolves to a Docker-network private address (as the mock does). It relaxes the egress guard’s deny-by-default policy for loopback, RFC1918, link-local, CGNAT, and IPv6 ULA destinations. It is a local-development-only credential-guard relaxation, is off by default in both the shipped application.yml and the base docker-compose.yml, and is only ever turned on by the opt-in overlay above. Never set it in a staging or production environment.

Even with this flag enabled, cloud-metadata addresses (for example 169.254.169.254) stay blocked. By design, the flag never widens the guard to cover metadata endpoints, regardless of flag state.

Known limitation: double /skills if the stored URL already ends in /skills

The feature composes the request URL by appending /skills to the stored marketplace URL. If you register a marketplace URL that already ends in /skills (e.g. http://example.com/skills), the actual outbound request goes to http://example.com/skills/skills. The Skills Hub settings page’s help text does not currently warn about this. Fixing that help text is out of scope for this change; register the marketplace’s base URL without a trailing /skills segment.

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