atl publish

Share the gains your global layer has accumulated for a team back to where it came from — ring 2→3 of gain circulation.

Usage

atl publish <handle>/<team>

<handle>/<team> is the team reference (the handle is the team's GitHub owner). The team must be installed at your global layer — publish works from your global gains, not a project's.

It diffs your global copy of the team against its published version (a fresh fetch of the source repo). Every file that differs — or that you've added — is a publishable gain. By default publish only shows the plan; nothing is forked, committed, or pushed until you pass --apply.

When to use it

Use it after a team has earned improvements through real use — a clearer instruction, a better pattern, a learning worth sharing with anyone who installs that team. atl update will also nudge you (gains in X not yet upstream — run atl publish X …) when it notices your global copy has drifted ahead of the published version.

publish is deliberate by design: it crosses the author boundary, so it never runs automatically. You invoke it (your consent to share outward); for a team you don't own, the owner accepts the PR (their consent). Either way, your own local and global gains never depend on acceptance.

What it does, by ownership

publish checks whether the team's repo owner matches your authenticated GitHub login:

• You own it → re-publish: clone the repo, stage the gains under the team's subpath, patch-bump team.json's version, then commit + tag + push, and ensure the repo carries the atl-team topic so the index reindexes.
• You don't own it → propose upstream: fork the source repo, branch off its default branch, stage the gains, push to your fork, and open a PR against the source repo — a best-effort contribution the owner can accept or decline.

The CLI does only the mechanics. The judgment (which divergences are worth sharing — general improvements, not project- or user-specific ones) and the prose (the PR body or commit message) come from the /publish skill, which drives this command and hands it the authored text via --body-file.

Flags

Flag	Effect
--apply	Act on the plan (fork + push + open the PR, or commit + tag + push). Without it, publish only prints the plan.
--body-file <path>	File holding the PR body (propose-upstream) or commit message (re-publish). Authored by the /publish skill. Required with --apply.
--dry-run	With --apply, print exactly what would happen (fork/branch/stage/push, or commit/tag/push) without touching GitHub. Works without --body-file.
--only <paths>	Restrict to these .claude-relative paths — the subset the skill kept after dropping project/user-specific gains. Repeatable / comma-separated.

--apply needs --body-file; to preview an apply without authoring a body, pass --dry-run.

Examples

Show what's publishable (no side effects):

atl publish mesut/my-team

atl publish: 2 publishable gain(s) in mesut/my-team (vs published main):
  modified  agents/reviewer.md
  new       rules/commit-style.md

You own github.com/mesut/my-team — these would re-publish to it (commit + version bump + tag).

Preview an apply for a team you don't own, then act once the /publish skill has written the PR body:

atl publish agentteamland/software-project-team --dry-run --apply
atl publish agentteamland/software-project-team --apply --body-file pr-body.md

atl publish: opened https://github.com/agentteamland/software-project-team/pull/42

Notes

• Whole-file gains (consistent with promote and fan-out) — each file is proposed as it stands in your global layer, not a hand-merge of fragments.
• Propose-upstream uses a deterministic branch (atl-publish/<handle>-<name>) and force-pushes, so re-publishing the same team updates its own branch and any open PR rather than colliding with a stale one.
• The mechanics need gh (authenticated) on your PATH. The default plan view does not.

Related

• atl search — discover teams via the same atl-team-topic index that publish keeps fresh.
• atl update — surfaces the "gains not yet upstream" suggestion that prompts a publish.

---

Installing atl

# macOS / Linux
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/agentteamland/atl/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

# Windows (PowerShell)
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/agentteamland/atl/main/scripts/install.ps1 | iex

Or grab a pre-built binary from GitHub Releases.