Getting started

Paste one line into your coding agent. It installs Agents CLI, designs a first agent with you, and runs it locally.

Agents CLI is a CLI and a set of skills for building, evaluating, and deploying agents on Google Cloud, with ADK, LangChain or the Claude Agent SDK. Agents CLI handles everything around your agent: scaffolding, evaluation, deployment, and observability.

What your coding agent does#

Evaluate and deploy#

Keep going in the same session:

Write evals for this agent and run them

Deploy this to Cloud Run

See Evaluation and Deployment for what happens under the hood.

What the skills teach your coding agent#

Agents CLI installs 7 skills:

Skill	What your coding agent learns
google-agents-cli-workflow	Development lifecycle, code preservation, model selection
google-agents-cli-adk-code	ADK Python and Go APIs: agents, tools, orchestration, callbacks
google-agents-cli-scaffold	Project scaffolding: create, enhance, upgrade
google-agents-cli-eval	Evaluation lifecycle: datasets, metrics, generate and grade, compare, analyze, optimize
google-agents-cli-deploy	Deployment: Agent Runtime in Gemini platform, Cloud Run, GKE, CI/CD
google-agents-cli-publish	Registration in the Gemini app
google-agents-cli-observability	Cloud Trace, logging, third-party integrations

See the skills reference for details.

Run the steps yourself#

Prerequisites#

Required: uv. It downloads Python 3.11 or later if you don't have it.

Recommended: Node.js, so setup installs the skills with npx skills and agents-cli update can update them. Without it, setup copies the skills instead.

Optional (for deployment): Google Cloud SDK, Terraform

Install#

uvx google-agents-cli setup

The setup command installs the CLI and the skills for the coding agents it finds on your machine.

Alternative installation methods

pipx: pipx install google-agents-cli && npx skills add google/agents-cli

venv + pip: pip install google-agents-cli && npx skills add google/agents-cli

Skills only: npx skills add google/agents-cli

Platform support: macOS, Linux, and Windows (WSL 2). Native Windows is not officially supported.

Authenticate#

If you're already authenticated with gcloud, Agents CLI picks up your Application Default Credentials automatically.

Otherwise, the quickest option is a Gemini API key from AI Studio:

export GEMINI_API_KEY="your-key-here"

In a scaffolded Python project, also comment out the GOOGLE_* lines in .env so the agent calls the Gemini API instead of Google Cloud. A Go project also needs a change to app/agent.go; see .env. See Authentication for full details.

Build with your coding agent#

Open your coding agent and check that it lists the google-agents-cli-* skills. In Claude Code, run /skills. Most other coding agents have a similar command or a settings panel. Then ask it to build something:

Build a support agent that answers questions from our docs

Build without a coding agent#

You can drive the entire workflow from your terminal, with no coding agent.

# Create a minimal agent project
agents-cli create my-agent --prototype --yes

# Install dependencies and start the dev playground
cd my-agent
agents-cli install
agents-cli playground

In ADK templates, the playground command starts the ADK web playground, with hot reload in Python projects. Other templates differ; see First-party frameworks. Open the URL the command prints (http://127.0.0.1:8080/... by default).

For a full walkthrough, see the manual workflow tutorial.

Templates and status#

Status as of October 2026.

Language	Template	Status	Notes
Python	adk_python (alias adk)	Default	ADK; A2A built in
Go	adk_go	Supported	ADK Go; API key needs a code change
Python	First-party template path	See First-party frameworks	LangGraph, Claude Agent SDK
Your choice	Your own template	Supported	--agent github.com/org/repo/path@tag; see Authoring

Pass the template with --agent. Without it, agents-cli create uses adk_python.

Demo#

Next steps#

• Tutorial: Build your first agent: build, evaluate, and deploy with your coding agent
• Tutorial: Manual workflow: type every command yourself
• Use cases: agent patterns people build
• Project structure: what each generated file does
• Extend the starter agent: the recipes your coding agent studies to add capabilities
• Development guide: the full development workflow
• CLI reference: all commands and flags
• Security and trust: what setup installs and runs, and how to limit it