How to Install a Claude Skill

New to Claude Code skills? No worries — this guide walks you through everything step by step.

What Is a Skill?

A skill is a small instruction file that teaches Claude Code how to do something specific. Think of it like a recipe — it tells Claude exactly what steps to follow for a task.

For example, a skill might teach Claude how to:

  • • Create a pull request with a specific format
  • • Run an SEO audit on your website
  • • Deploy code to your server
  • • Generate a changelog from your git history

Instead of explaining what you want every time, you just type a quick command and the skill handles the rest.

Types of Skills

⚡

User-Invocable (Slash Commands)

You run these manually by typing a slash command.

/commit
/deploy
/seo

Great for tasks you want to trigger on demand.

⚙️

Auto-Triggered (Background Skills)

These activate automatically when Claude detects a matching situation.

# Auto-runs when Claude sees
# API code being written

Runs in the background — no command needed.

What You Need

Before installing a skill, make sure you have:

  • Claude Code installed on your computer (install guide)
  • A terminal or VS Code with the Claude Code extension
  • Access to the ~/.claude/commands/ folder on your computer

Step-by-Step Installation

1

Find a Skill You Want

  • • Go to the Browse page and find a skill you like
  • • Click on it to open the skill detail page
  • • Read the description to make sure it does what you need
2

Download the Skill

  • • Click the Download button on the skill page
  • • A .zip file will download to your computer
  • • Unzip it — inside you'll find a .md file (that's the skill)
3

Choose Where to Install

Skills can go in one of two places depending on how you want to use them:

Global (All Projects)

~/.claude/commands/

Available everywhere on your machine

Project Only

your-project/.claude/commands/

Only available in that specific project

Tip: Not sure which to pick? Start with global — you can always move it later.

4

Move the File

Open your terminal and run one of these commands:

For global install:

# Create the folder if it doesn't exist
mkdir -p ~/.claude/commands

# Move the skill file
mv ~/Downloads/skill-name.md ~/.claude/commands/

For project-only install:

# Navigate to your project
cd /path/to/your-project

# Create the folder if it doesn't exist
mkdir -p .claude/commands

# Move the skill file
mv ~/Downloads/skill-name.md .claude/commands/

Important: Replace skill-name.md with the actual filename you downloaded.

5

Use the Skill

Open Claude Code and type a slash followed by the skill name:

# In Claude Code, just type:
/skill-name

The skill name is the filename without the .md extension. For example, if you installed commit.md, you'd type /commit.

Skills with Subfolders

Some downloaded skills come with subfolders (a folder containing multiple .md files). These are namespaced skills — they group related commands together.

# Example folder structure after unzipping:
~/.claude/commands/
  seo.md
  seo/
    technical-audit.md
    schema-templates.md

To use them, type the folder name, a colon, then the sub-skill:

/seo
/seo:technical-audit
/seo:schema-templates

Just move the entire folder into your commands directory — Claude Code handles the rest.

Troubleshooting

Skill doesn't show up when I type /

  • • Make sure the file ends in .md
  • • Check that it's inside ~/.claude/commands/ (global) or .claude/commands/ (project)
  • • Restart Claude Code — sometimes it needs a fresh start to pick up new files

Downloaded file is a .zip, not .md

  • • That's normal! Unzip it first to get the .md file inside
  • • On Mac, double-click the .zip. On Windows, right-click and choose "Extract All"

The commands folder doesn't exist

  • • Just create it! Run: mkdir -p ~/.claude/commands

Ready to get started?

Browse our community library and find the perfect skills to supercharge your Claude Code workflow.

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