AI Skill

The vcr-app-creator skill is an AI agent skill that provides expert, step-by-step guidance for building and deploying applications to Vonage Cloud Runtime. Once installed, it activates automatically whenever you ask your AI assistant to create a VCR application, write a vcr.yml manifest, configure secrets, deploy, debug locally, or publish to the Code Hub.

Installation

npx skills add "vonage-technology/vonage-agent-skills" --skill vcr-app-creator

The skill is hosted in the vonage-agent-skills repository. It is compatible with any AI coding assistant that supports the skills protocol (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, Gemini CLI, and others).

What the Skill Does

When activated, the skill guides you through a structured workflow:

  1. Understand the application — collects project name, runtime, Vonage Application ID, capabilities, region, and optional features. If you do not have a Vonage Application ID, the skill runs vcr app create for you.
  2. Generate vcr.yml — produces a valid manifest with only the sections your app needs.
  3. Generate build.sh — produces a runtime-appropriate build script that installs dependencies and compiles code without starting the application.
  4. Configure health check, environment, and secrets — adds the required health check endpoint, explains VCR-injected variables, and shows how to reference secrets safely.
  5. Review and confirm — presents all generated files for your approval before writing anything to disk.
  6. Deploy and debug guidance — walks through vcr debug for local development and vcr deploy for production.
  7. Troubleshoot — diagnoses common failures (health check path mismatch, wrong bind address, missing secrets, invalid runtime) with a quick checklist.

The skill also covers:

  • Publishing to the VCR Code Hub / Marketplace using the neru-mcp MCP server.
  • SDK best practices: session scoping, stateless architecture, and correct provider usage.
  • Migrating from the deprecated neru-alpha package to the current SDK (@vonage/vcr-sdk for Node.js, vonage_cloud_runtime for Python).

Activation Triggers

The skill activates automatically for prompts such as:

  • "Create a new VCR application"
  • "Write a vcr.yml for my Node.js app"
  • "How do I deploy to Vonage Cloud Runtime?"
  • "Set up vcr debug for local development"
  • "Publish my app to the Code Hub"
  • "Migrate from neru-alpha"

It does not activate for general Vonage API questions where VCR is not the hosting platform.