Open core
What's open and what a hosted offering adds — and the guarantee that you can always point the CLI at a registry you run yourself.
SkillHub is built open core. The pieces that make a registry work — the package format, the CLI, the API server, the database schema, the scanner, and the S3-backed content store — are meant to run on infrastructure you control. A hosted service layers convenience and commercial features on top of that same core, but it is never the only way to run one.
The guarantee
The core stays self-hostable by design: a registry is a Postgres database, an S3-compatible object store, and one Node service. Vendor-specific features are kept out of the core paths, so the registry doesn't depend on any single hosting provider to function. Whatever a hosted offering does, you can always stand up your own registry and point the CLI at it.
The escape hatch is a single setting: point the CLI at any registry with the
registryUrl config key (or the --registry-url flag / registry-URL environment
override). See Configuration.
What's open
The parts you need to run a registry yourself:
- The package format. The skill manifest and the content-addressed archive layout are the same everywhere.
- The CLI. Install it from npm, then aim it at any registry — hosted or your own — with the registry-URL setting. See Configuration.
- The API server. A reference server lives in the repository. See Running your own registry.
- The data model and scanner. The database schema (managed by migrations) and the publish-time security scanner run identically wherever the registry runs, so a local publish is checked the same way a hosted one is.
What a hosted offering adds
A hosted service is the same core plus the operational layer a public, multi-tenant deployment needs — the kind of thing that only makes sense when someone else runs the servers:
- Managed infrastructure — the database, object storage, and server run for you, with backups and upgrades handled.
- Billing and plans — seat-based subscriptions and the surrounding entitlement enforcement.
- Multi-tenancy — many independent organizations sharing one deployment safely.
- Enterprise features — single sign-on, expanded audit retention, version signing, and support.
These are convenience and commercial layers. None of them are required to publish, install, or resolve skills against a registry you run.
The philosophy
The reason the seam exists is portability. Client work often lives in repositories you don't own, and a workflow you can only run on someone else's servers is a workflow you don't fully control. Open core keeps the escape hatch open: run on a hosted service when it's convenient, and run your own registry when you'd rather own the whole stack.