# Personal, Project and Plugin Skills — Claude Code Skills & SKILL.md

Source: https://www.geekswithgeeks.com/en/claude-code-skills/u-locations

> Put a skill in the right place for who should use it.

## Choose the location by audience

Claude Code looks for skills in specific folders. **Personal skills** live in your home directory (`~/.claude/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md`) and are available in every project on your machine: good for your own habits and tools. **Project skills** live in the repository (`.claude/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md`), are committed to git, and so are shared with everyone who clones the project: good for team procedures, release steps and repo-specific checks. **Plugins** can bundle skills together with commands, agents and hooks for distribution across many projects or organisations. When skills with the same name exist in several places, a precedence order decides which is used; check the documentation for the current rules, and avoid duplicate names. Folder locations and plugin mechanisms evolve between versions, so confirm in the docs of the version you use.

## Install, trigger, share

Personal and project skills live in known folders, trigger by description or by name, and are shared through version control or plugins.

![Three questions: where, how invoked, how shared.](assets/figures/claude-code-skills/section-4-map.svg) — Figure 4.1 — Where, how invoked and how shared.

## Where to put a skill

Paths follow current Claude Code conventions; verify for your version.

```text
Audience               Location                                   Shared how
just me, all projects  ~/.claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md           not shared (your machine)
my team, one repo      <repo>/.claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md      committed to git, reviewed in PRs
many teams / org       a plugin that bundles skills (+ commands,   installed from a marketplace or
                       agents, hooks)                             repository

Rule: put team procedures in the repo so they are versioned and reviewed like code.
```

## Avoid duplicate names

The same name in personal and project folders can cause confusion about which one runs.

**Quiz:** Where should a skill used by the whole team on one repository live?

- [ ] Only in one person's home folder
- [x] In the repository's project skills folder, committed to git
- [ ] In a chat message
- [ ] Nowhere; skills cannot be shared

*Answer:* In the repository's project skills folder, committed to git. Project skills travel with the repo and get code review.