Registry subscriptions

Installing a whole registry is the bulk primitive — the equivalent of cloning a repo. It installs every skill in the registry and records a registry subscription in your lockfile:

skillhub install @studio/design-systems

The subscription is the durable statement of intent ("I follow this registry"), separate from the individual skills currently on disk.

Following by default

By default a subscription follows the registry:

• Skills published to the registry later are auto-installed on the next skillhub sync.
• Skills removed from the registry are reported as orphaned in skillhub list and stay on disk; run skillhub sync --prune to remove them.

That keeps your installed set tracking the registry as it evolves, with no manual bookkeeping.

Shaping a subscription

You can tune what a subscription pulls in:

• --no-follow — freeze membership to the skills that existed at install time. New skills are not auto-added.
• --exclude <names> — carve out specific skills you don't want.
• --tag <tag> — resolve all members at a dist-tag (default latest).
• Per-skill pins — pinning an individual skill overrides the subscription's version policy for just that skill.

skillhub install @studio/design-systems --no-follow --exclude legacy-skill
skillhub install @studio/design-systems --tag beta

Reconciling with sync

skillhub sync reconciles the skills on disk against the resolved subscription set — everything your subscribed registries (and skillsets) currently contain. It applies adds, updates, and removes within your declared ranges and verifies hashes:

skillhub sync
skillhub sync --prune

Use --prune to remove skills the subscription set no longer contains.

Orphaned skills

If a registry is deleted, or your access is revoked, its skills don't vanish from disk — they stay in place but are marked orphaned in skillhub list. This keeps your working tree stable even when upstream access changes. To clean them up when you're ready:

skillhub sync --prune