Baselight skills

Agent Skills that provides access to Baselight — a data platform with thousands of queryable public datasets covering crypto/blockchain, finance, demographics, climate, healthcare, sports, and more.

What it does

When you ask a data question, your agent will search Baselight's catalog, inspect the relevant table schema, and query it directly using DuckDB SQL — returning actual data instead of web search snippets.

Example triggers:

• "Compare GDP across countries"
• "Show me happiness score trends"
• "Query @owid.happiness.owid_happiness_2"

Installation

Claude Code plugin

This repository doubles as a Claude Code plugin marketplace. Installing the plugin gives you the skill and a connection to the remote Baselight MCP server in one step:

/plugin marketplace add baselightdb/skills
/plugin install baselight@baselight

The plugin bundles the same skills/baselight skill shipped in this repo (no files are duplicated) plus an MCP entry for https://api.baselight.app/mcp. See Setup for the API key.

npx installation

npx skills add baselightdb/skills --skill baselight -g

Manual installation

Copy the skill into your agent's skills directory. Example for Claude Code:

cp -r skills/baselight ~/.claude/skills/baselight

It should pick it up automatically on the next session.

Setup

You need a Baselight API key:

1. Sign up at baselight.app
2. Go to Account Settings → Integrations → Generate New API Key
3. Save it to ~/.baselight/credentials:

mkdir -p ~/.baselight
echo 'BASELIGHT_API_KEY=your-key-here' >> ~/.baselight/credentials
chmod 600 ~/.baselight/credentials

When you install the plugin, Claude Code prompts for the API key and stores it in the system keychain. The MCP server uses it directly, and a SessionStart hook mirrors it into ~/.baselight/credentials (replacing only the BASELIGHT_API_KEY line and leaving anything else intact) so the bundled skill — which reads that file — uses the same key. One prompt covers both.

Leave the prompt blank to manage credentials yourself: the hook becomes a no-op, and both the skill and the MCP server fall back to the BASELIGHT_API_KEY environment variable, then ~/.baselight/credentials.

Note: entering the key at the prompt writes it to ~/.baselight/credentials in plaintext (in addition to the keychain), because the skill's script reads it from there.

Structure

.
├── .claude-plugin/
│   ├── marketplace.json        # Plugin marketplace catalog (this repo as its own marketplace)
│   └── plugin.json             # Plugin manifest: sources skills/ + the remote MCP server
└── skills/baselight/
    ├── SKILL.md                # Skill definition and instructions for Claude
    ├── scripts/
    │   └── baselight.py        # Python MCP client (no extra deps beyond requests)
    └── references/
        └── sql-patterns.md     # DuckDB SQL reference and examples

The plugin uses a marketplace-root source ("source": "./"), so the plugin and the skill share the existing skills/ directory — the skill files are never duplicated.

Requirements

Python 3 with requests:

pip install requests

License

MIT