| name | discover-shed-tool |
| description | Search the Tool Shed for an existing wrapper, drill from hit to a pinnable changeset, classify candidates, and recommend or fall through. |
discover-shed-tool
Follow the procedure below and use the artifact/reference sections as the runtime contract.
When To Use
- Search the Tool Shed for an existing wrapper, drill from hit to a pinnable changeset, classify candidates, and recommend or fall through.
Inputs
- No upstream artifact inputs declared. See the procedure for user-supplied runtime inputs.
Outputs
- Write artifact
galaxy-tool-pin as galaxy-tool-pin.json. Format: json. Schema: galaxy-tool-discovery. (owner, repo, tool_id, version, changeset_revision) pin for a Tool Shed wrapper plus discovery classification.
Required Tools
Load Upfront
references/schemas/galaxy-tool-discovery.schema.json: Schema file copied verbatim into the bundle. Validate the hit, weak, or miss recommendation emitted by Tool Shed discovery.
Load On Demand
references/cli/tool-revisions.json: CLI command reference packaged as a sidecar. Resolve a Tool Shed tool version to an installable changeset revision. Use when: after selecting a candidate version that needs a reproducible changeset pin.references/cli/tool-search.json: CLI command reference packaged as a sidecar. Search the Tool Shed for candidate wrappers matching a step's tool need. Use when: resolving a workflow step to an installable Galaxy tool wrapper.references/cli/tool-versions.json: CLI command reference packaged as a sidecar. List available Tool Shed versions for a selected candidate. Use when: after a Tool Shed search candidate is selected and before pinning a version.references/notes/component-tool-shed-search.md: Research note copied verbatim into the bundle. Explain Tool Shed search/indexing limitations that affect hit scoring and fallthrough decisions. Use when: results are missing, weak, duplicated across owners, stale, or ambiguous.
Validation
- Validate
galaxy-tool-pin.json before returning it: run foundry validate-galaxy-tool-discovery galaxy-tool-pin.json from @galaxy-foundry/foundry. If the command is not on PATH, run npx --package @galaxy-foundry/foundry foundry validate-galaxy-tool-discovery galaxy-tool-pin.json. This checks artifact galaxy-tool-pin against the galaxy-tool-discovery schema.
Procedure
Discover whether the Galaxy Tool Shed already publishes a wrapper for the tool a workflow step needs, and resolve the discovery to a (owner, repo, tool_id, version, changeset_revision) quintuple that downstream steps can pin and cache.
This skill is the Tool Shed leg of the discover-or-author branch in Galaxy-targeting per-step pipelines. On a hit, the skill recommends a pin and exits successfully. On a miss (or a low-quality hit), it falls through to author-galaxy-tool-wrapper. The branch itself is harness logic; this skill owns only the discovery half.
Inputs
The skill expects, per step:
- A free-text need describing what the step should do (typically a one-line description of the tool, plus any constraints — file format in/out, container language, license preferences).
- Optional owner hint (e.g.
devteam, iuc) when the caller has a strong prior.
- Optional exact-name hint when the caller knows the canonical XML id.
Outputs
A structured recommendation object, JSON-shaped:
{
"status": "hit",
"candidate": {
"tool_shed_url": "https://toolshed.g2.bx.psu.edu",
"owner": "devteam",
"repo": "fastqc",
"tool_id": "fastqc",
"trs_tool_id": "devteam~fastqc~fastqc",
"version": "0.74+galaxy0",
"changeset_revision": "5ec9f6bceaee",
"score": 12.3,
"matched_terms": ["fastqc"],
"match_fields": ["name", "description"],
"rationale": "single dominant hit on tool name"
},
"alternates": [],
"rationale": "single dominant hit on tool name; latest version pinned to newest changeset",
"warnings": []
}
status semantics:
hit — recommend pinning. Caller should cache and proceed.weak — candidate exists but the skill is not confident (e.g. only help-text matched, multiple owners with similar tools, deprecated repo, stale-index suspicion). Caller should confirm or fall through.miss — no usable hit. Caller falls through to author-galaxy-tool-wrapper.
Procedure
The skill follows the gxwf-shaped discover-and-pin chain. It does not call the Tool Shed HTTP API directly — the TS CLI wraps the call sequence and gotchas covered in component-tool-shed-search.
1. Search
Issue tool-search with the need's keywords. Start narrow:
gxwf tool-search "<keywords>" --json --max-results 10
If an owner hint is present, add --owner <owner>. If an exact-name hint is present, add --match-name. Lowercase the query (the tool index does not lowercase, see component-tool-shed-search §6).
Normalize a tool-id-shaped need before searching. A caller (e.g. a template _plan_context that guessed a candidate) may hand this skill an XML-id token rather than a human name — iuc/integron_finder, integron_finder. The lexical index does not reliably match the underscored token: tool-search integron_finder returns no hits while integron finder and integron both score. So derive query variants instead of feeding the token verbatim: strip any owner/ prefix, split on _ / - into space-separated words, and also try the bare significant word. A miss is only honest after the name variants have been tried — a no-hit on the raw underscored token alone is a search artifact, not evidence the tool is absent.
2. Triage hits
For each hit, score on:
- Name match. Exact match on
toolId or name is a strong signal; help-only matches are weak.
- Owner reputation.
iuc and devteam repos are typically maintained; an unfamiliar owner with a single-tool repo is a weaker prior. (No machine-readable approval flag exists — the Tool Shed's approved field is dead code.)
- Recency. Recent
last_updated strengthens a hit; very old wrappers can still be valid but warrant the weak classification.
- Duplicates across repos. Two owners can publish wrappers with the same XML id. Either pick the maintained one or downgrade to
weak and surface the choice.
Drop hits from deprecated repos when detectable. Note: deprecated repos can still appear in shed search results until the next index rebuild — see component-tool-shed-search §6.
3. Resolve to a pinnable version
For the top candidate, list versions:
gxwf tool-versions <trsToolId> --json
Pick the newest installable version unless the need specifies otherwise (rare: a workflow may pin to a specific historical version for reproducibility). Be aware that TRS dedupes by version string — multiple changesets may publish the same version, and only one is visible at this layer.
4. Resolve to a changeset
Drill from (trsToolId, version) to a concrete changeset:
gxwf tool-revisions <trsToolId> --tool-version <v> --latest --json
Prefer --latest so the newest changeset publishing that version wins (tool versions are not monotonic; two changesets can legally publish the same version with different content). The output's changesetRevision is what lands in the workflow's tool_shed_repository.changeset_revision for reproducible reinstall.
5. Classify and emit
Combine the scored hit and the resolved pin into the recommendation object above:
- One dominant hit + clean version+changeset resolution →
hit.
- Multiple plausible hits, ambiguous owner, deprecated suspicion, or only-help-text match →
weak with the leading candidate plus alternates.
- No usable hit →
miss.
Validate the recommendation with validate-galaxy-tool-discovery before returning it. Do not rely on prose-only shape checks; downstream phases branch on this contract.
Caveats baked into the procedure
The procedure assumes — and the skill must surface in its rationale when relevant — the following Tool Shed realities (full detail in component-tool-shed-search §6):
- Indexes are stale by design. A freshly published tool may not appear; a deprecated tool may still appear. Treat absence as soft evidence, not proof.
- Wildcard
*term* wrapping disables stemming; spelling matters. Try alternate phrasings before declaring miss. In particular an underscored or owner-prefixed tool-id token (integron_finder, iuc/integron_finder) can score zero where the human name (integron finder) hits — never declare miss on a single id-token query (see §1 normalization).
- No EDAM in shed search — semantic queries that work in Galaxy's installed-toolbox search will not work here. Stick to lexical name/keyword queries.
- Same XML id across repos. Hits collapse only on
(repoName, owner); expect duplicates that need triage.
- Repo-level discovery is a different surface. For "find me the package that contains a tool about X" with server-side
owner: / category: keywords, gxwf repo-search is the right command — out of scope for this skill but a known sibling.
Non-goals
- Authoring. This skill never produces a tool wrapper. On
miss, the harness's discover-or-author branch fall-through invokes author-galaxy-tool-wrapper.
- Caching. This skill emits a pin recommendation. The caller (or the next phase) runs
galaxy-tool-cache add toolshed.g2.bx.psu.edu/repos/<owner>/<repo>/<tool_id> --tool-version <v> to populate the cache.
- Galaxy-instance discovery. Hitting a running Galaxy server's installed-tool index (EDAM-aware, panel-aware) is a different mechanism — the future
discover-tool-via-galaxy-api skill. The contrast is sketched in component-tool-shed-search §4.
- Test-data resolution. Out of scope; handled by the
test-data-resolution branch elsewhere in the pipeline.
Runtime Notes
- Do not read Foundry source files at runtime; use only files packaged in this skill bundle and user-supplied artifacts.
- Preserve declared artifact filenames unless the user or harness supplies explicit paths.
- Carry unresolved assumptions into the output artifact instead of silently inventing missing source evidence.
