AppPack skill for Claude Code

A Claude Code skill that teaches Claude how to drive AppPack — a PaaS that runs containerized apps on your own AWS account.

Claude loads it automatically when a conversation turns to AppPack apps, addons, clusters, pipelines, review apps, or the apppack CLI.

Install

/plugin marketplace add apppackio/apppack-skill
/plugin install apppack@apppack-skill

That's it — the skill is available in every session. Claude Code checks for updates in the background; to pull them immediately:

/plugin marketplace update apppack-skill

Without the marketplace

To run it from a local checkout — useful when developing the skill:

git clone https://github.com/apppackio/apppack-skill
claude --plugin-dir ./apppack-skill

What it covers

Ask Claude to scale a process, wire up a database, chase a failing build, or explain what a cluster actually is, and it answers from this skill rather than from half-remembered Heroku habits.

The whole command surface. Every command and flag, rendered straight from the CLI's own apppack docgen output. It describes the version that shipped, not whatever was true the last time someone hand-edited a Markdown file.

How an app is configured. The Procfile, apppack.toml and app.json in your repo — what each one controls, which wins when both exist, and which keys apply only to Dockerfile builds versus buildpack builds. Plus the parts that live outside the repo: config in SSM Parameter Store, app shape in CloudFormation stack parameters.

The traps. Places where AppPack does something other than what you'd guess: flags that look global but are registered per command, a memory flag that rejects a bare number, a subcommand that now exists only to tell you it was replaced. These are the mistakes that cost an afternoon, and they're why the reference is generated rather than written by hand.

Care around the sharp edges. destroy is irreversible and admin-only, so Claude confirms the target before running one, and secrets read out of config don't get echoed into your scrollback.

Layout

.claude-plugin/
  plugin.json                     # plugin manifest
  marketplace.json                # self-hosted marketplace entry
skills/apppack/
  SKILL.md                        # curated; loaded when the skill triggers
  references/cli.md               # GENERATED; full command surface, loaded on demand
scripts/gen_cli_reference.py      # docgen output -> references/cli.md
Justfile                          # just cli-docs / check-cli-docs / validate

SKILL.md is deliberately short — concepts, the commands people actually run, and the gotchas. The exhaustive flag-by-flag reference lives in references/cli.md so it costs nothing until Claude needs it.

Contributing

skills/apppack/references/cli.md is generated — do not hand-edit it. It is rendered from apppack docgen, which is the CLI's own cobra command tree and therefore cannot drift. Regenerate after a CLI change:

just cli-docs

CI runs just check-cli-docs on every PR and weekly against the latest CLI release; it fails if the committed reference no longer matches, so a new flag can't ship undocumented.

Curated knowledge that docgen cannot know — version history, operational advice, why a default is dangerous — belongs in SKILL.md, not in the generated file. Avoid restating generated facts (flag lists, defaults) in SKILL.md: duplicated facts drift, which is the problem this setup exists to prevent.

Before opening a PR:

just check    # validate manifests + CLI reference freshness

Links

• AppPack · docs · CLI reference
• Claude Code skills · plugins