APM – Agent Package Manager

An open-source, community-driven dependency manager for AI agents.

Think package.json, requirements.txt, or Cargo.toml — but for AI agent configuration.

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Documentation · Quick Start · CLI Reference · Roadmap

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Portable by manifest. Secure by default. Governed by policy. One file describes every agent's context; one command reproduces it everywhere; one policy controls what an org will allow.

Why APM

AI coding agents need context to be useful — standards, prompts, skills, plugins — but today every developer sets this up manually. Nothing is portable nor reproducible. There's no manifest for it.

APM fixes this. Declare your project's agentic dependencies once in apm.yml, and every developer who clones your repo gets a fully configured agent setup in seconds — with transitive dependency resolution, just like npm or pip. It's also the first tool that lets you author plugins with a real dependency manager and export standard plugin.json packages.

# apm.yml — ships with your project
name: your-project
version: 1.0.0
dependencies:
  apm:
    # Skills from any repository
    - anthropics/skills/skills/frontend-design
    # Plugins
    - github/awesome-copilot/plugins/context-engineering
    # Specific agent primitives from any repository
    - github/awesome-copilot/agents/api-architect.agent.md
    # A full APM package with instructions, skills, prompts, hooks...
    - microsoft/apm-sample-package#v1.0.0
  mcp:
    # MCP servers -- installed into every detected client
    - name: io.github.github/github-mcp-server
      transport: http   # MCP transport name, not URL scheme -- connects over HTTPS

git clone <org/repo> && cd <repo>
apm install    # every agent is configured

Coming from npx skills add? Drop-in:

apm install vercel-labs/agent-skills                            # whole bundle, like npx skills add
apm install vercel-labs/agent-skills --skill deploy-to-vercel   # one skill, persisted to apm.yml

Same install gesture. You also get a manifest, lockfile, and reproducibility.

Zero-config Copilot:

apm compile -t copilot   # writes .github/copilot-instructions.md

One command, no configuration -- VS Code and GitHub Copilot read the file automatically. APM dogfoods this target on its own repository.

The three promises

1. Portable by manifest

One apm.yml describes every primitive your agents need — instructions, skills, prompts, agents, hooks, plugins, MCP servers — and apm install reproduces the exact same setup across every client on every machine. apm.lock.yaml pins the resolved tree the way package-lock.json does for npm.