Capability Packs: Installing and Managing Them

HQ deliberately ships small. The core scaffold gives you the essentials, and everything richer arrives as a capability pack: a signed bundle you install once, which then shows up in your sessions like it was always there. This page covers what packs are, the two ways to install them, and the safety checks that run on every install.

What a pack is#

A pack is one downloadable bundle that can contain any mix of:

• Skills and commands, which appear as new slash commands in your sessions
• Workers, persistent AI specialists (see Commands, Skills, and Workers)
• Knowledge bases, reference material HQ can search and cite
• Policies, standing rules HQ follows
• Hooks, scripts that run on session events (these get special safety treatment, covered below)
• MCP servers, connections to outside tools, which like hooks are never registered without an explicit confirmation prompt at install time

Official packs are published by Indigo, and the catalog also carries curated packs from the open-source ecosystem, each credited to its creator. For where packs sit in the wider product family, see The HQ Ecosystem.

Where did the engineering pack go?#

The coding toolkit (commands like /tdd, /review, /execute-task, and /run-project) used to ship as a separate pack called hq-pack-engineering. It's now built into HQ again, so everyone has it and there's nothing to install.

If you installed the old pack before, you can remove it so you don't have two copies:

hq packs uninstall hq-pack-engineering

Installing without a terminal#

You don't need the command line. The HQ app has a pack manager called the Marketplace. To get there, click the Marketplace icon on the left rail. You can also click the Core button at the top-right of the HQ window and choose Marketplace. The Marketplace has these sections:

• Browse shows approved packs you can install. Open a pack to install it, either just for you (Personal) or for a company you're an admin of.
• Installed shows the packs already in your HQ, with their versions and update or uninstall options.
• Submit is for publishing a pack of your own.

Installed packs show Update when a newer version is available. The Core menu also has Check for updates for HQ itself.

To see the individual skills and workers your packs have added, open a company and look in its Brain section (Skills and Workers). The Library item on the left rail is something else: it holds your personal files and what's been shared with you.

The Marketplace does the same thing as the terminal commands below, so it doesn't matter which you use.

Installing from the terminal#

The hq CLI manages packs with four commands:

Company scoping. By default a pack installs for your whole HQ. Add --company to scope it to one company instead:

hq install adobe-campaign-ops --company acme-corp

Scoped installs put the pack's workers under that company's folder rather than the shared one, so the capability stays inside the right tenant.

Signing in to the pack registry. Downloads from the registry require an account, and it's your normal HQ sign-in: hq login opens a browser sign-in, hq whoami shows who you are and what you are entitled to, and hq logout clears the session. One reassurance, because the names are close: hq login in the terminal and /hq-login inside a session authenticate the same HQ identity, so being signed in to HQ Cloud for sync and sharing also covers registry downloads.

Anyone can browse the catalog without signing in; only downloads require an account with entitlement to the pack.

What actually happens during an install#

Installation is one step from your side, with the sensitive parts still gated on you:

1. The CLI downloads and verifies. The pack is fetched from the registry and its integrity is cryptographically verified (details in the safety box below).
2. It wires into your HQ. The pack's content lands under core/packages/{name}/ and is linked into your sessions. Anything sensitive still needs your consent: the install pauses and asks before any hook or MCP server is added, and you can skip those parts.

Clean removal. Everything a pack adds is marked with the pack's prefix, so removal is complete: hq packs uninstall (or the Marketplace) finds every worker, command, skill, knowledge folder, policy, and hook the pack installed and removes them all. Packs contain no compiled programs, so there is no hidden runtime state left behind.

The safety model, in plain English#

Packs are the one place where outside content gets to add behavior to your HQ, so the checks are strict:

• Every download is cryptographically verified twice. The file's SHA256 fingerprint must match, and its RSA signature must verify against the publisher's key. A tampered or unofficial pack is rejected before it is even unpacked.
• Only three file types are allowed in a pack: .yaml, .md, and .sh. Binaries are rejected outright, so a pack cannot smuggle in an executable program.
• Hooks require your explicit approval. Hooks are the most sensitive content because they run shell scripts on session events. Before any hook installs, HQ shows you the full script, explains what triggers it, and waits for your explicit yes. No hook is ever installed without you seeing its code.
• The capabilities field is a trust signal. Each pack's manifest carries a capabilities list, populated by a security scan rather than by the author, naming any host surfaces the pack touches (hooks, scripts, network, filesystem, secrets). An empty list means none. Read it before installing, the way you would read app permissions on your phone.

Common questions#

If you get stuck#

If a pack command is missing after an install, start a fresh session; commands are discovered at session start. If an install fails partway, run it again from the Marketplace or the terminal, and see The "I'm Stuck" Guide for the general decision tree. Still stuck? /hq-bug.