## Why Skills Board
Useful skill recommendations tend to disappear into chats, bookmarks, and personal agent setups. Skills Board gives a team one searchable place to collect the skills it recommends and lets every teammate choose how to use them.
- **One team library.** Save useful skills once, organize them with team-specific tags, and make them easy to find again.
- **Different agents welcome.** Share the same recommendation across Claude, Codex, Cursor, and other agent setups.
- **A choice of handoff.** Open the original source, copy a compatible install command, or download the latest skill files as a ZIP.
- **Organization-scoped access.** Create a team, invite members, and keep each library available to its members.
- **Optional MCP access.** Connect compatible agents to authenticated, scope-controlled tools for finding and organizing team skills and collections.
> [!IMPORTANT]
> A saved skill is a team recommendation, not a security review, compatibility certification, or pinned release. Skills Board reads the latest available source; inspect that source before using it in an agent.
## How it works
1. Create a team library and add a skill from its GitHub repository.
2. Skills Board keeps the original source visible and records the recommendation for the team.
3. Teammates search by task, description, repository, or tag.
4. Each teammate opens the source, copies a compatible command, or downloads the latest files as a ZIP.
The public catalog can help with discovery when the deployment has Vercel OIDC available. The team library and direct GitHub flow remain the core product.
## Run locally
### Prerequisites
- Node.js 20.9 or newer
- pnpm 10
- PostgreSQL 15 or newer
### 1. Install the app
```bash
git clone https://github.com/TommyBez/skillsboard.git
cd skillsboard
corepack enable
pnpm install
cp .env.example .env.local
```
Generate a Better Auth secret with `openssl rand -base64 32`, then add it and your PostgreSQL connection string to `.env.local`.
### 2. Prepare the database
Apply the committed Drizzle migrations to a new database. This creates both the Better Auth tables and the application-specific tables from the versioned SQL in `drizzle/`.
```bash
pnpm db:migrate
```
### 3. Start developing
```bash
pnpm dev
```
Open [http://localhost:3000](http://localhost:3000). Restart the server after changing `DATABASE_URL`, because the PostgreSQL pool is created when the module loads.
### Environment variables
| Variable | Required | Purpose |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `DATABASE_URL` | Yes | PostgreSQL connection string used by the application; Neon may use the pooled URL here. |
| `DATABASE_URL_UNPOOLED` | For migrations on Neon | Direct PostgreSQL connection used by Drizzle migrations. It can match `DATABASE_URL` for local, non-pooled Postgres. |
| `BETTER_AUTH_SECRET` | Yes | Secret used to sign and encrypt authentication data. |
| `BETTER_AUTH_URL` | Recommended | Public application origin; use `http://localhost:3000` locally. |
| `CRON_SECRET` | Yes for hosted release cleanup | Dedicated random secret used to authenticate the daily expired collection-release cleanup configured in `vercel.json`. |
| `RESEND_API_KEY` | Yes outside development | Sends sign-in OTP and team invitation emails through Resend. |
| `EMAIL_FROM` | Yes outside development | Verified Resend sender for OTP and invitation emails (e.g. `Skills Board `). |
| `RESEND_WEBHOOK_SECRET` | Yes for hosted email delivery | Verifies Resend bounce, complaint, suppression, and unsubscribe webhooks. |
| `EMAIL_PRIVACY_SECRET` | Yes in Vercel Production | At least 32 random bytes encoded as base64 or hex; the dedicated root for email hashes and encrypted unsubscribe links. Local/self-hosted environments can fall back to a domain-separated key derived from `BETTER_AUTH_SECRET`. |
| `EMAIL_PRIVACY_SECRET_PREVIOUS` | Only during key rotation | JSON array of retained base64/hex roots used for dual-hash suppression lookup and unsubscribe-token decryption. A prior root cannot be removed while retained records still depend on it. |
| `GITHUB_TOKEN` | No | Raises GitHub API rate limits for metadata and ZIP downloads. |
| `VERCEL_OIDC_TOKEN` | No | Supplied automatically by Vercel for the optional skills.sh catalog. |
Sign-in and sign-up use email one-time codes (no passwords). Outside development, configure both `RESEND_API_KEY` and a domain-verified `EMAIL_FROM`; the fallback Resend test sender only works for Resend’s own test recipients. In development, OTP emails are skipped and any 6-digit code works. Without Vercel OIDC, the Discover catalog degrades gracefully while team libraries continue to work.
Hosted deployments run the collection-release retention cleanup once per day. Set `CRON_SECRET` in the Vercel Production environment before deploying; the endpoint fails closed when the secret is absent. Self-hosted deployments can invoke `/api/cron/collection-release-retention` from their scheduler with `Authorization: Bearer `.
Product communications are separate from transactional OTP and invitation email. Signup consent is optional and off by default, can be changed under **Settings → Email**, and is enforced with local consent history, suppression records, signed unsubscribe links, and verified Resend delivery webhooks. See [`docs/email-compliance.md`](./docs/email-compliance.md) before configuring a product broadcast.
## MCP access
Skills Board exposes an OAuth-protected MCP endpoint at `/api/mcp`. After signing in, open **Settings → MCP** to connect it. The tools can search team skills and collections, retrieve install commands, and discover public or repository skills. With `skills:write`, they can save new skills and organize collections. They cannot edit or delete saved team skills, install them in an agent, or execute them.
## Tech stack
| Layer | Technology |
| --- | --- |
| Application | Next.js 16 App Router, React 19, TypeScript |
| UI | Tailwind CSS 4, shadcn/ui, Base UI |
| Authentication | Better Auth (email OTP) with organizations and OAuth provider support |
| Data | PostgreSQL, Drizzle ORM |
| Email | Resend and React Email |
| Agent access | Model Context Protocol via `mcp-handler` |
| Hosting | Vercel and Neon in the hosted deployment; self-hosting is supported |
## Project commands
| Command | What it does |
| --- | --- |
| `pnpm dev` | Start the Turbopack development server. |
| `pnpm typecheck` | Run the TypeScript compiler without emitting files. |
| `pnpm check` | Run the repository's required local checks. |
| `pnpm db:generate --name ` | Generate a versioned migration after changing the schema. |
| `pnpm db:check` | Check that the schema and committed migration snapshots match. |
| `pnpm db:migrate` | Apply pending migrations to the configured database. |
| `pnpm db:push` | Push the schema only to a throwaway database used for prototyping. |
| `pnpm build` | Create a production build. |
| `pnpm start` | Start the production server. |
| `pnpm email` | Preview React Email templates on port 3001. |
## Contributing
Issues and pull requests are welcome. Read [CONTRIBUTING.md](./CONTRIBUTING.md) before making a substantial change, follow the [Code of Conduct](./CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md), and report vulnerabilities through the process in [SECURITY.md](./SECURITY.md).
See the people who have helped build Skills Board on the [contributors page](https://github.com/TommyBez/skillsboard/graphs/contributors).
## License
Skills Board is available under the [MIT License](./LICENSE).
