Local tiles

Installing tiles from the file system.

Tiles are often spoken of as shared context, referring to how to use a library, or steering the agent, and this is usually shared via the Tessl Registry. However, there are often cases where the tile may not be shared via Tessl Registry, and may even be repository specific, or you may want to try out a tile you are creating without publishing it first. This is accomplished by installing a Tile from the file system.

To install the tile, a path will be passed to the tessl install command. The path given will be to the folder containing the tile.json for the tile.

Installing a tile from the file system

tessl install file:<path to tile> 

Running this command makes the local tile available to Tessl and your agent. When viewing your tessl.json the entry will have a file: resource reference.

Some common examples of where Tessl has seen this pattern used

• Monorepos and repository specific context:

  • You might have frontend and backend in a single repository. There might be many micro-services that interact with each other.

  • You may have created a tile, codifying these style guides, technical architecture and design patterns.

  • You would install these tiles, using this method, to be discoverable via MCP server.

• Your application may have very specific instructions for agents during the build process specific to the application. The tile itself is often checked into the code repository, cloned, and installed this way because the tile is repo specific.

• You are authoring a tile and want to test it before publishing to Tessl Registry. Additionally you may run tessl tile pack [--output <path>] <source> and tessl tile lint <source> to test packaging and contents.