14.5 Skills & Plugin Ecosystem: ClawHub and Community Contributions

🦞 "SKILL.md is not a document — it's a public contract."

SKILL.md: OpenClaw's Extension Contract

Each Skill is a directory with SKILL.md (plus optional scripts):

~/.openclaw/skills/
├── send-email/
│   ├── SKILL.md
│   └── send.ts
└── flight-search/
    ├── SKILL.md
    └── search.py

Structure

---
name: send-email
description: Send an email via Gmail. Use when the user asks to "send/reply email".
tools: [gmail.send]
permissions: [gmail.send]
version: 0.1.0
author: yourname
---

# Trigger
User asks to send / reply / broadcast email.

# Flow
1. Collect recipient, subject, body
2. Call gmail.send
3. Return result (message id / success)

# Constraints
- Plain text by default unless HTML requested
- Confirm recipient & subject before sending

The 4 key fields

📌 description is a retrieval index for the LLM — write it well so the Agent triggers the Skill at the right moment.

ClawHub: The Skill Marketplace

openclaw skills search "email"       # browse
openclaw skills install send-email   # install
openclaw skills publish ./my-skill   # publish (community)

Three ecosystem layers

Community Forks: Proof of Sound Abstraction

⚠️ Sizes per each repo's main branch README.

The core abstraction is small and stable enough that re-implementing it in another language is "translation," not "redesign."

Section Summary

Next section: 14.6 Practice: Build a Personal Assistant