chaparral

The connective tissue between your projects.

Chaparral manages shared Claude Code skills and brand identity across every repo in an organization. One brand repo holds the truth. Chaparral links it everywhere it needs to go.

Built for people who work across multiple orgs and clients. Multi-org by default.

The problem

You have an org directory — say ~/code/manzanita-research/ — with a dozen repos inside. They share a design language, a brand voice, a set of Claude Code skills that shape how AI works with your code. But Claude Code discovers skills per-project (.claude/skills/) or globally (~/.claude/skills/). There's no org level.

So you copy things around. You forget. Projects drift. The new repo never gets the frontend design skill. The brand voice doc is three versions behind in half your projects.

Claude Code has a plugin marketplace now, but it solves a different problem — distribution to other people and machines. Plugins copy to a cache, require per-repo configuration, and need manual updates after changes. When you're actively developing shared skills across sibling repos, you need something faster.

The fix

Put a chaparral.json manifest in your brand repo. Chaparral finds it, reads it, and symlinks your shared skills and org-level CLAUDE.md into every sibling repo. Edit a skill in the brand repo and it's instantly live everywhere. No reinstalls, no cache invalidation, no per-repo setup.

~/code/manzanita-research/
├── CLAUDE.md                    ← symlink, managed by chaparral
├── brand/
│   ├── chaparral.json           ← manifest
│   ├── org/
│   │   ├── CLAUDE.md            ← org-wide Claude instructions
│   │   └── skills/
│   │       ├── frontend-design/
│   │       └── brand-voice/
│   └── ...
├── toyon/
│   └── .claude/skills/
│       ├── frontend-design/     ← symlink
│       └── brand-voice/         ← symlink
├── ceanothus/
│   └── .claude/skills/
│       ├── frontend-design/     ← symlink
│       └── brand-voice/         ← symlink
└── ...

Install

go install github.com/manzanita-research/chaparral/cmd/chaparral@latest

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/manzanita-research/chaparral.git
cd chaparral
go build -o chaparral ./cmd/chaparral

Usage

TUI dashboard

chaparral

Launch the interactive dashboard. Toggle between skills view and repos view with tab. Navigate with j/k, sync with s or enter, install marketplace plugins with i from the repos view.

Sync everything

chaparral sync

Discovers all org directories, finds brand repos (by chaparral.json), and links skills into every sibling. Idempotent — safe to run anytime.

Check status

chaparral status

Shows what's linked, what's stale, what's new and unlinked. Also shows installed marketplace plugins per repo.

Validate skills

chaparral validate

Checks skill structure for errors and warnings — missing SKILL.md, bad frontmatter, etc.

Generate plugin manifests

chaparral generate
chaparral generate --marketplace

Generates plugin.json manifests for each skill (dry run to stdout). With --marketplace, also generates the marketplace.json catalog.

Publish to marketplace

chaparral publish
chaparral publish --check
chaparral publish --write-only

Writes plugin manifests and pushes your marketplace to GitHub. Use --check to see if local skills are newer than published. Use --write-only to write manifests without pushing.

Clean up

chaparral unlink

Removes all chaparral-managed symlinks. Only touches symlinks it created.

The manifest

Your brand repo needs a chaparral.json at its root:

{
  "org": "manzanita-research",
  "claude_md": "org/CLAUDE.md",
  "skills_dir": "org/skills",
  "exclude": ["brand"]
}

Field	What it does
org	Human-readable org name (for display)
claude_md	Path to the org-level CLAUDE.md, relative to brand repo root
skills_dir	Directory containing shared skills, relative to brand repo root
exclude	Repos to skip when linking (the brand repo itself, forks, archives)

How discovery works

Chaparral looks for org directories in ~/code/. Any subdirectory that contains a repo with a chaparral.json is treated as an org. This means you can manage multiple orgs — different clients, different brands, all from one tool:

~/code/
├── manzanita-research/    ← org (brand/ has chaparral.json)
├── temple-of-silicon/     ← org (identity/ has chaparral.json)
├── cosmic-computation-lab/ ← org (brand/ has chaparral.json)
└── personal-projects/     ← not an org (no chaparral.json anywhere)

Local skills vs marketplace plugins

Chaparral and Claude Code's plugin marketplace are complementary:

	Local skills (chaparral)	Marketplace plugins
Propagation	Symlinks — instant	Cache copies — requires update
Setup	One manifest, auto-discovered	Per-repo .claude/settings.json
Best for	Active development, fast iteration	Stable distribution to others
Scope	Org directory	Per-user or per-project

Chaparral is your workbench. The marketplace is your storefront. Develop locally with symlinks, then run chaparral publish to push them to your marketplace when they're stable.

What it doesn't do

• No file copying for sync. Symlinks only. One source of truth.
• No global installs into ~/.claude/. Everything stays org-scoped.
• No magic. It creates symlinks and tells you what it did. Publishing is the one exception — publish writes manifests and pushes to GitHub, but only when you ask.

Named for

The chaparral — dense, fire-adapted brushland that covers California's coastal hills. Manzanita, ceanothus, sage, toyon — they grow together in this ecosystem, their roots intertwined beneath the surface. Different plants, same soil. That's the idea.

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With love from California.