Updating PM Skills

The update-pm-skills skill keeps your local pm-skills installation current with the latest release. It checks versions, previews changes, creates backups, and produces a structured report — all without you having to manage files manually.

This guide is for end users who installed pm-skills via clone or ZIP download. If you are a repo contributor, use git pull instead.

Three Modes

The updater runs in one of three modes depending on the flag you pass.

Quick status check

/update-pm-skills --status

Prints your current version, the latest available version, and whether an update is available. No files are read or written beyond the version check.

Preview (report only)

/update-pm-skills --report-only

Runs the full comparison — version delta, value summary, file manifest — and saves a report to _pm-skills/updates/, but does not write any skill files. Use this when you want to see what changed before committing to an update.

Full update (default)

/update-pm-skills

Walks through the complete flow: pre-flight checks, preview, confirmation prompt, optional backup, file update, smoke test, and completion report.

What Gets Updated (and What Doesn’t)

The updater writes only files included in the official release ZIP produced by build-release.sh.

Updated:

Directory	Contents
`skills/`	Core skill files
`commands/`	Slash command definitions
`_workflows/`	Workflow chains
`library/`	Sample library and skill output samples
`docs/` (public)	User-facing guides, reference, workflows
Root files	`AGENTS.md`, `README.md`, `CHANGELOG.md`, `mkdocs.yml`, etc.

Never touched:

Directory	Why
`docs/internal/`	Excluded from the release ZIP
`_NOTES/`	Local-only, gitignored
`_pm-skills/`	Your local state — reports, backups
`.github/`	CI workflows, not in the ZIP

Files you added locally that are not in the upstream release are left untouched. The updater never deletes local files.

How Backups Work

Before writing any files, the updater offers to create a backup of your current installation.

If you accept (recommended), it copies all in-scope files to:

_pm-skills/backups/v{current-version}_{YYYY-MM-DD_HHMMSS}/

The _pm-skills/ directory is created automatically if it does not exist. Backups are never overwritten by future updates — each one gets a unique timestamped directory.

Restoring from a Backup

If you need to roll back, copy the backup contents over your installation root:

cp -r _pm-skills/backups/v2.9.0_2026-04-09_143022/* .

On Windows (PowerShell):

Copy-Item -Path "_pm-skills\backups\v2.9.0_2026-04-09_143022\*" -Destination "." -Recurse -Force

If you did not create a backup but your installation is a git clone, you can restore tracked files with git checkout . to return to the last committed state.