Scaffold NocoBase 3 Apps with the Official Agent Skills

Every AI-built business app rebuilds the same foundation: permissions, workflow engines, approvals — full of edge cases, and sessions may improvise differently each time. NocoBase, the open-source platform for building, running, and evolving business systems with AI, now ships official agent skills that point your coding agent at a ready-made foundation instead of a blank directory.

Why This Skill Matters

NocoBase's README names the problems directly: every project rebuilds permissions and workflow engines from scratch, architecture drifts between sessions, parallel work outpaces human review, and know-how scatters across chat sessions. The platform provides that foundation, and the official skills teach your agent to build on it — creating the app, installing the result, and developing plugins inside a NocoBase 3 source workspace.

The distribution repo, nocobase/skills-v3, is a lightweight mirror of the skills maintained in the main nocobase/nocobase repository. It currently ships three skills:

Installation

Open a coding agent that supports Skills in an empty directory and install the application-creation skill:

npx skills@latest add nocobase/skills-v3 --skill nocobase-create-app -g

Select your coding agent when the installer prompts you. If the agent does not recognize the new skill, start a new session.

To install all three skills at once, replace the skill name with '*':

npx skills@latest add nocobase/skills-v3 --skill '*' -g

To check tracked skills for updates later, run npx skills@latest update. NocoBase 2 users should use the separate nocobase/skills repository instead — skills-v3 targets NocoBase 3 only.

Real Workflow: Create a NocoBase 3 App from an Empty Directory

The main README's quick start requires Node.js 24+ and pnpm 11; Windows users should use WSL. The examples use SQLite, so no separate database server is needed.

1. Open your coding agent in an empty directory with the skill installed.
2. Send the prompt the README documents:

Follow the nocobase-create-app Skill to create and start a NocoBase 3 application in the current empty directory, using the default template and SQLite.

3. Follow the skill as it scaffolds and starts the application in that directory.

If you prefer the terminal, the README documents a no-agent path too: PNPM_CONFIG_MINIMUM_RELEASE_AGE=0 pnpm create @nocobase/app@beta my-app --template-tag=beta, then pnpm nocobase config init --dialect sqlite, pnpm nocobase config check, and pnpm dev from the app directory.

Tips

• The plugin-development skill targets a NocoBase 3 source workspace, per the distribution README's skill table.
• Old global installations are not removed automatically. The distribution README notes that migrating from the earlier nocobase-v3-plugin-development distribution name requires reinstalling, and that you should check which version owns an installation before removing it.
• Skills content is maintained in the main nocobase/nocobase repository and synced into skills-v3 — to change skill behavior, edit the source and open a PR there, not in the distribution repo.
• Application-owned skills, such as the app-development and deployment skills under the main repo's app-skills package, ship in their own npm packages rather than through skills-v3.

When Not to Use This

If you are maintaining a NocoBase 2 application, the skills-v3 distribution is the wrong target — the NocoBase 2 skills live in a separate repository. And if you just want a throwaway prototype with no permissions, workflows, or approvals, a governed platform is more foundation than the project needs.

See the leaderboard for more skills.