When installing skills in Hermes Agent, the most direct solution is to configure the GITHUB_TOKEN in ~/.hermes/.env. The official skills documentation states that the quota for uncertified GitHub APIs is low, and the quota will increase significantly after configuring the token.
Why install skills run into GitHub throttling
Hermes' Skills Hub searches, checks, downloads skill sources, and reads repository metadata and security audit information. When you browse, search, and install multiple skills in a row, it's easy to trigger GitHub no-login request credits.
How to deal with it
- Go to GitHub and create a token that is only used to read public repositories, with permissions kept to a minimum.
- Execute
hermes config set GITHUB_TOKEN ghp_xxxto get Hermes to write to the.env. - Re-run
hermes skills searchorhermes skills install. - If it still fails, wait for the current limit window to resume and reduce the number of batch searches.
Safety reminders
Do not write GITHUB_TOKEN into the .env of the project repository and submit it, and do not send it to the group chat for the agent to read. It belongs to the personal key in Hermes home and should be placed in ~/.hermes/.env.
It is also recommended to run inspect or check the source before installing the skill. Throttling is just a connection issue, and what you really need to be careful about is whether the third-party skill is trustworthy, whether it requests too many permissions, and whether it contains scripts that contain outgoing data.
