A month ago we shipped the deployment.io MCP server. Your coding agent could deploy from the conversation — "ship this to staging", and it would. But the tools were only half the job.

The agent had what to do, not how to do it well. It would guess the wrong publish_directory for a Vite app. Forget to push unpushed commits before deploying. Keep retrying a deploy that was waiting for approval. Tools need a playbook.

Introducing the Deployment.io Skill

Today we're open-sourcing the deployment.io skill for coding agents — a SKILL.md-compliant runbook that teaches your agent how to deploy on deployment.io, correctly, on the first try.

It's one file. MIT licensed. Lives at github.com/deployment-io/skills.

git clone --depth 1 --branch v0.1.0 https://github.com/deployment-io/skills.git /tmp/dio-skills
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r /tmp/dio-skills/skills/deployment-io ~/.claude/skills/

Restart your agent. Done.

What the Skill Changes

Without the skill, your agent figures things out by trial and error. With it, the agent knows:

Framework → publish_directory. Vite/Svelte/Astro → dist. Create React App → build. Next.js static export → out. Hugo → public. Jekyll → _site. Picked correctly the first time.
is_spa = true for client-side routers, false for static site generators. No more broken deep links or duplicate-content issues.
Port discovery for web services. Reads the Dockerfile EXPOSE, app listen calls (app.listen(3000), http.ListenAndServe(":8080")), or PORT env usage.
Health-check routes. Searches for /health, /healthz, /ping, /ready before defaulting to /.
Git pre-flight. Runs git fetch, checks for unpushed commits, captures the exact SHA for commit_hash — so the runner deploys what you verified locally.
Diagnose-bad-deploy. When a deploy fails, the agent pulls get_deployment_logs for a window around the failure and reads the job output, instead of asking you what went wrong.
Approval flow. If a deploy to a protected environment returns "Approval required", the agent polls get_approval_status — it doesn't retry the original call.

Your agent just gets better at deploys. You don't have to explain any of this up front.

What that looks like

Without the skill:

You: Deploy my React app to staging. Agent: What's the build command? What publish directory? Is it a SPA? Do I need to push first?

With the skill:

You: Deploy my React app to staging. Agent: Running git fetch origin main. You have 2 unpushed commits — pushing now. Detected Vite + react-router-dom, so publish_directory: "dist", is_spa: true. Deploying commit a3f9c21. Here's the approval link for the staging environment...

Four questions vs. four actions. Same input from you.

The Numbers

When we moved the runbook out of the tool descriptions and into the skill, our most-used tool descriptions shrank by ~80%. deploy_static_site went from ~1,500 chars to ~380. deploy_web_service went from ~2,000 chars to ~280. Every MCP-connected session — even one that never triggers the skill — now pays less context tax.

More capability, less overhead per conversation.

Works Across 30+ Agents

SKILL.md is an open standard (agentskills.io). The deployment.io skill works with:

Claude Code
Claude Desktop
Cursor
OpenAI Codex
Gemini CLI
GitHub Copilot
Antigravity
JetBrains Junie
... and 25+ others

One file. Install it once per agent, works across every project.

Why This Is Separate from the MCP Server

The MCP server is always on — every session loads its tool descriptions, so it stays lean. The skill loads only when your prompt matches a deploy intent, so it can be rich (framework tables, multi-step runbooks, diagnostic recipes) without bloating sessions that don't need it.

Progressive disclosure. Your agent gets the runbook exactly when it needs it.

Try It

If you already have the MCP server connected:

git clone --depth 1 --branch v0.1.0 https://github.com/deployment-io/skills.git /tmp/dio-skills
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r /tmp/dio-skills/skills/deployment-io ~/.claude/skills/

If you don't — start with the MCP configuration guide, then come back and install the skill.

Ask your agent to deploy something. Watch it run the git pre-flight without being told, pick the right publish_directory, and diagnose its own failures.

That's the playbook.

Install paths for Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, and more: docs/coding-agents/deployment-io-skill.
Source, issues, and releases: github.com/deployment-io/skills — ⭐ the repo to get notified when we ship updates.
Extend it. MIT licensed. Fork and layer in your team's deploy conventions — PRs welcome.
Feedback? Open an issue on the repo or reach out — we're iterating on this actively.