toolbase 0.7.0

The community registry and CLI for AI agent toolkits - discover, share, and serve tools to AI agents over MCP

toolbase

The package manager for AI agent toolkits. Install toolkits into isolated environments, curate which tools your agent sees, and serve them to your harness over the Model Context Protocol. Toolkits span any domain, from web and data utilities to scientific categories like astro, hep, and quantum.

A toolkit is the publishable unit. It bundles tools an agent can call and/or skills — short markdown how-to guides surfaced into your harness. Each toolkit installs into its own isolated Python environment, so dependency conflicts between toolkits are never a problem. A toolkit can even ship only skills (a skill pack).

Full CLI reference: https://toolbase-ai.com/docs.

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Install toolbase

pip install toolbase     # Python 3.12+

Arm your agent

The loop is install → activate → connect. tb is a short alias for toolbase; both ship with the package and behave identically.

tb install calculator             # download into an isolated environment
tb activate calculator            # expose it to the agent
tb connect claude-code            # write toolbase into Claude Code's MCP config

Now launch your harness (e.g. claude for Claude Code) — or, in an already-running session, reconnect the toolbase MCP server. The tools appear as calculator__add, calculator__multiply, etc. tb install calculator -a installs and activates in one step.

Install ≠ activate. Installing places a toolkit in the global cache but serves nothing — activation is what exposes it to the agent. The binary always lives in the shared cache (~/.toolbase/cache/); only the activation is scoped: tb activate writes to the current directory's .toolbase/ by default, -g writes to the user-wide profile instead.

tb connect writes the MCP config for you. Claude Code, Codex, and Orchestral are all supported (tb connect --harnesses lists them); Claude Code and Codex are MCP clients (tb connect edits their config file), while Orchestral gets a runnable agent script you launch yourself. It also surfaces the activated toolkits' skills into the harness — see Skills.

Inspect

tb list              # installed toolkits, ✓ active / ✗ inactive
tb list -v           # per-tool view with bundle + config-gating annotations
tb logs              # tool calls, live (best diagnostic for "did it fire?")

Curate what the agent sees

tb activate / deactivate work at four granularities:

tb activate calculator                # the whole toolkit
tb activate calculator/scientific     # one bundle (group of related tools)
tb activate calculator__add           # one specific tool
tb deactivate calculator__quickstart  # one specific skill (see Skills below)

A <toolkit>__<name> item is a skill when it matches a surfaced skill and not a tool; otherwise it's a tool (a name that is both resolves to the tool). A bundle is a self-contained capability an author carves out of a toolkit, with its own deps and skills. tb profile tools calculator lists what's available. Power users can keep several named profiles (tb profile create paper, tb connect claude-code --profile paper) and switch between them; most users only ever touch the default profile.

Tools are served namespaced as <toolkit>__<tool> by default, so two active toolkits that both define, say, an add tool stay distinct (calculator__add vs matrix__add). When names do overlap, tb serve, tb list -v, and tb install flag it so it's never a surprise. Prefer bare names? tb serve --bare (or default.bare: true in serve.yaml) advertises the plain <tool>; a name shared by two toolkits stays qualified (both remain callable) with a warning, and the rest are served bare.

Skills: guides that travel with the toolkit

A toolkit can ship skills — markdown how-to guides in skills/ — alongside its tools or on their own. tb connect surfaces the activated toolkits' skills into the harness you connect, in that harness's native format:

• Claude Code → ~/.claude/skills/<toolkit>__<skill>/ — auto-surfaced to the model and available as a /<toolkit>__<skill> slash command.
• Codex → ~/.codex/prompts/<toolkit>__<skill>.md — a /<toolkit>__<skill> slash-command prompt.

Skills follow the same curation as tools: a guide is surfaced only when its toolkit is active, and you toggle a single one with the activation grammar.

tb deactivate calculator__advanced_guide   # stop surfacing this one guide
tb activate   calculator__advanced_guide   # bring it back

tb connect --no-skills wires the MCP server without surfacing any skills; tb disconnect removes the surfaced skills too. Surfacing is a connect-time step, so tb install alone reports a toolkit's skills but doesn't surface them — connect (and the set you've activated) decides what lands in the harness.

A toolkit that ships only skills is a skill pack: it declares no tools and serves nothing over MCP, but its guides surface through tb connect exactly like any other toolkit's.

Share a project without sharing your machine

Toolkits that need configuration (an API key, a path to an external binary) read it from three layers, later winning key-by-key:

Layer	File	For
user	~/.toolbase/config/<kit>.yaml	your defaults and secrets, every project
project	<repo>/.toolbase/config/<kit>.yaml	committed, shared with the team
local	<repo>/.toolbase/config/<kit>.local.yaml	this project on this machine; gitignored

tb config set calculator precision 10                  # committed
tb config set calculator solver_path /opt/bin --local  # yours alone

Toolkit versions split the same way: manifest.yaml is committed so a collaborator who clones the project and runs tb install gets the same toolkits at the same versions, while manifest.local.yaml holds machine-local pins like editable installs.

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Authoring a toolkit

tb init my-toolkit             # scaffold from template
cd my-toolkit
# write tools in tools/ and skills in skills/
# (a toolkit may ship only skills — a skill pack — and omit tools entirely)
tb validate                    # check structure
tb login                       # one-time browser-flow auth
tb publish                     # ship it (auto-registers on first run)

Iterating locally. Develop a toolkit's code without a publish→install round-trip by installing it editable:

cd my-toolkit
tb install -e . -a             # live symlink to this source dir, and activate

Edits to your tool source appear on the next serve; rerun tb install -e . to rebuild the env when dependencies change.

For the full author guide — tool conventions, skills, bundles, configuration, setup.py — see https://toolbase-ai.com/docs/authoring. For the agent-assisted authoring flow (recommended for first toolkits), see https://toolbase-ai.com/docs/scaffold-with-an-agent.

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Commands

Full reference with all flags: https://toolbase-ai.com/docs/reference/commands.

Command	Purpose
tb install NAME	Install a toolkit (-a to also activate, -e <path> for editable, NAME[a,b] for selected bundles)
tb uninstall NAME	Remove a toolkit
tb list	Installed toolkits (-v for a per-tool view)
tb activate ITEM	Expose a toolkit / toolkit/bundle / toolkit__tool / toolkit__skill (project-local; -g for user-wide)
tb deactivate ITEM	Hide a toolkit / bundle / tool / skill
tb connect HARNESS	Wire toolbase into Claude Code, Codex, or scaffold an Orchestral agent script (also surfaces skills; --no-skills to skip)
tb disconnect HARNESS	Remove toolbase from a harness (and its surfaced skills)
tb logs	Tail the serve log, live
tb profile …	Manage named profiles: list | show | create | edit | delete | set-default | path | tools
tb config …	Manage per-toolkit config: show | init | set | unset | edit | path | validate (--user / --project / --local pick the layer)
tb setup TOOLKIT	Run a toolkit's setup.py (--reset, --check)
tb project init	Create .toolbase/ here
tb init NAME	Scaffold a toolkit from template
tb validate / tb ingest	Check toolkit structure / regenerate toolkit.yaml from code
tb login / tb whoami / tb logout	Registry auth
tb publish	Package and upload to the registry

See CHANGELOG.md for the full release history.

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Architecture

Three pieces:

• CLI (this package) — installed locally, manages toolkit environments and serves tools.
• Backend (api.scitoolkit.org) — registry, auth, tarball storage.
• Website (toolbase-ai.com) — discover and manage published toolkits.

Each installed toolkit runs in its own subprocess in its own Python environment. toolbase serve aggregates them and exposes the union as a single MCP server upstream; failures in one toolkit don't affect others.

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Contributing

Issues and PRs are welcome at https://github.com/alexr314/toolbase.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Links

• Website: https://toolbase-ai.com
• Docs: https://toolbase-ai.com/docs
• Backend API: https://api.scitoolkit.org
• GitHub: https://github.com/alexr314/toolbase
• Issues: https://github.com/alexr314/toolbase/issues