Hermes installation

Know which home receives the skills before you install.

Hermes takes its team through the npm installer rather than the Hermes plugin index. Roles arrive as read-only role skills plus profile blueprints; canonical skills arrive as ordinary skills under the same home. Nothing is created or started automatically.

Last reviewed: 2026-07-21 · Surface: npm installer, hermes tool target

Prerequisites

Node.js 18+ with npx available, and network access to the npm registry.
A decision about the target home. A non-empty HERMES_HOME is the final root for the installer. With it unset, POSIX resolves to ~/.hermes and Windows to %LOCALAPPDATA%\hermes.
Awareness that Hermes itself resolves its home in three layers, not two: a context-local override injected by a wrapper script, then HERMES_HOME, then the platform default. HERMES_HOME is the process-level answer, and a profile-aware wrapper can override it inside a running process.

If you run Hermes in more than one profile, set HERMES_HOME explicitly. When it is unset while a non-default profile is sticky-active, Hermes falls back to the platform default home and only logs a one-time warning in errors.log, which is how cross-profile data lands in the wrong place.

Install step by step

Preview without writingRun the command without --install. Every planned file prints with an absolute path under HERMES_HOME. Read the list before applying it.
Apply the file changesRerun with --install. Existing managed targets are backed up before replacement, and nothing outside the selected scope is deleted.
Inspect the two skill rootsConfirm that role skills are under skills/agi-super-team-agents/ and canonical skills under skills/agi-super-team/. Both live under the same resolved home.
Decide about profiles yourselfThe installer writes profile blueprints but does not run hermes profile create, schedule cron, or start a gateway. Creating profiles is a separate, deliberate action.

npx -y agi-super-team@latest --tool hermes
HERMES_HOME=/path/to/hermes npx -y agi-super-team@latest --tool hermes --install
npx -y agi-super-team@latest --tool hermes --install --connect

Add --all-subagents to install all 92 specialists; the default installs only the 14 canonical roles. Passing --home and HERMES_HOME at the same time is an error unless both resolve to the same directory. Repeat --tool to target several harnesses in one run.

What the package changes

Role skills at $HERMES_HOME/skills/agi-super-team-agents/ast-*/SKILL.md, one skill per canonical role.
Canonical skills at $HERMES_HOME/skills/agi-super-team/<skill>, copied byte for byte.
Profile blueprints at $HERMES_HOME/agi-super-team/profiles/ast-*/profile.json, one per executive role and the Governor.
Connection state at $HERMES_HOME/agi-super-team/connection.json, plus a receipt.json written by --connect.

The adapter mode behind the blueprints is a real Hermes concept: profiles are first-class, each with its own configuration, sessions, skills, gateway, and persona, and the Kanban board assigns tasks per profile. The Blueprint file format is not. Hermes has no profile.json blueprint schema; that file is an AGI Super Team product, marked blueprint-only, and Hermes creates profiles through its own profile commands such as hermes profile create.

Evidence boundary

Checked locally against the v1.6.0 checklist at an isolated home: 524 file additions, including all fourteen executive profile blueprints, and no profiles/ directory was created for you. Runtime role loading, Kanban dependency chains, and an independent Governor profile were not exercised.

Check the result

ls "$HERMES_HOME/skills/agi-super-team-agents"
ls "$HERMES_HOME/agi-super-team/profiles"
hermes skills list
hermes profile list

Re-run the preview afterwards. Everything that landed correctly reports as unchanged. A file on disk proves the artifact exists; it does not prove Hermes loads or delegates to it, so the receipt keeps runtimeEvidence at pending until a real session shows the roles being loaded and used.

Limitations

AGI Super Team is not packaged as a Hermes plugin. There is no package root plugin.json for Hermes to consume, so hermes plugins install is not a route into this team; the installer is. The blueprint files are a repository convention layered on a real Hermes mechanism, and they are not validated by Hermes itself.

Role skills land under skills/agi-super-team-agents/ rather than in a directory Hermes documents as a role registry. Whether Hermes treats them as delegatable roles or as loadable knowledge depends on how your Hermes release surfaces skills, and that was not verified here.

The path semantics in this guide follow the installer's resolution rules. Hermes upstream has since added the context-local override layer described above, and the repository's versioned reference for those rules is a commit pinned at official tag v2026.8.3, which is behind the current release. Treat the resolution order as current, and the pinned line references as historical.

An external directory you add yourself is not a write boundary

skills.external_dirs is a supported Hermes mechanism, but Hermes documents that external directories are not a read-only boundary: if the process can write the directory, an agent's skill management calls can edit or delete files there. The installer does not write this key for you. If you point it at a shared location, use filesystem read-only permissions or isolate it in a dedicated profile, and keep a change audit.

Rollback and uninstall

Remove the two managed skill trees, skills/agi-super-team-agents/ and skills/agi-super-team/, plus agi-super-team/ for the connection and receipt. These are scoped paths, so removing them does not disturb unrelated skills.

Profiles you created yourself with hermes profile create are yours: this package never created them, and uninstalling does not delete them. Remove them with the Hermes profile commands if you no longer want them. Do not delete the whole HERMES_HOME directory, which also holds credentials, sessions, and configuration.