§ 20 April 2026 — Tooling

A small new repo, sparrow-mcp, bundles the maintainer-facing Sparrow workflows as Claude Code skills. Drop the skills/ directory into ~/.claude/skills/ and Claude can cut releases, import content, and roll deploys the same way a human operator would.

Four skills, four operations

Each skill is a short markdown brief plus a recipe. Skills don't run code themselves — they tell Claude the steps, the pitfalls, and the verification commands. The repo ships four:

  • sparrow-release — walk the image chain (sparrow-core → sparrow-edu → site images), updating setup.cfg, __init__.py, requirements/base.txt, and .env in lockstep, then build and push.
  • sparrow-import — push YAML content into a running pod's /tmp/ and run manage.py import_pages without waiting for a rebuild. Covers both kubectl cp and the /api/wagtail/import/ HTTP endpoint.
  • sparrow-deploy — update the kapitan inventory in gedu-sites-model, recompile only the affected targets, commit, push, and force-refresh the ArgoCD application.
  • sparrow-screenshot — trigger portfolio_catalog/tasks.generate_website_thumbnail against the in-namespace Selenium grid. Mostly useful right after a customer-site visual refresh.

Why skills, not an MCP server (yet)

The natural shape for this is a Model Context Protocol server with one structured tool per operation — that lets non-Claude clients call them too. But the operations themselves are mostly orchestration over git, kubectl, and docker that Claude already runs well. A skill is a 200-line markdown file. A server is a service to deploy, version, and secure.

Skills are step one. They make the workflows reproducible, document the pitfalls (cache-stays-warm tag bumps, maxSurge=0 outages, kapitan plugin stalls), and surface the prerequisite checks that a human would otherwise forget. If a structured MCP server becomes the right shape later, the recipes are already there.

Installing

Clone the repo, symlink the skills/ directory into ~/.claude/skills/, and the skills become available in Claude Code via /sparrow-release, /sparrow-import, /sparrow-deploy, /sparrow-screenshot:

git clone https://github.com/sparrow-cms/sparrow-mcp.git
ln -s "$PWD/sparrow-mcp/skills" ~/.claude/skills/sparrow

Source on GitHub: github.com/sparrow-cms/sparrow-mcp.