Apache Tika is a toolkit that reads many kinds of files and extracts their text and descriptive metadata, including from formats such as PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel. Applications and agent pipelines use it to turn documents into content they can process, search, or pass to language models. The catalogue skills provide reusable ways for coding agents to run Tika for file-to-Markdown extraction.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to apache/tika. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/tika/main/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/apache/tikaWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/apache/tika/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/apache/tika/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/apache/tika/agents-md/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/apache/tika/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/apache/tika/agents-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00936 | $0.00936 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00374 | $0.00374 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00187 | $0.00187 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00094 | $0.00094 |
Grade A, and why
tika AGENTS.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 74 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Agent Guidance for Apache Tika
Detailed guidance lives in .skills/ — devs/ for working on Tika,
users/ for using it as a tool; one directory per skill, each with a
SKILL.md. Read .skills/devs/development/SKILL.md before doing anything else — it has
the ground rules: build with ./mvnw (always clean, -Pfast for quick
builds), never run git commit/git push or write to GitHub, code and test
conventions, pre-commit checks.
.skills/ is contributor guidance, not project policy (that lives in
SECURITY.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, and the release process).
Local overrides
A skill may have a private companion at $TIKA_SKILLS_LOCAL/<name>/LOCAL.md
(default ~/.tika-skills): machine paths, personal workflow defaults. Read it
after the public skill; it wins on conflict. Additive unless a ## Replaces
section names public rules it turns off. Never committed, never quoted into
any public artifact.
Working on Tika
Contributor-facing — building, testing, and releasing this codebase.
| Skill | Use when |
|---|---|
.skills/devs/development/SKILL.md |
Any development task — load at session start |
.skills/devs/feature-workflow/SKILL.md |
Multi-PR features; reviews keep changing interfaces; splitting a large branch |
.skills/devs/pr-review/SKILL.md |
Reviewing a PR or branch, or self-reviewing before submitting |
.skills/devs/metadata-schema/SKILL.md |
Adding/renaming metadata keys; schema gate failures |
.skills/devs/tika-eval-compare/SKILL.md |
Before/after corpus comparison of two Tika builds |
.skills/devs/tika-eval-encoding-regression/SKILL.md |
Charset-detector regression hunts |
.skills/devs/tika-eval-h2-query/SKILL.md |
Querying the tika-eval H2 database directly |
.skills/devs/update-site-for-release/SKILL.md |
Updating tika.apache.org for a release |
.skills/devs/oss-fuzz/SKILL.md |
Fuzzing a parser locally (OSS-Fuzz Jazzer targets); reproducing an OSS-Fuzz crash |
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 2mo ago First seen · 74 lines · 936 tokens per session scan A cb7d84170954
tika AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository apache/tika (4,130 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 936 tokens to every session, about $0.0037 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
tika AGENTS.md compared with instructions from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| tika AGENTS.mdapache/tika | Instructions file | 4.1k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 936 | Codex, OpenCode |
| vibetags com-example-service-OrderService.instructions.mdPIsberg/vibetags | Instructions file | 25 | today | MIT | A | 553 | GitHub Copilot |
| vibetags com-example-security-SecurityConfig.instructions.mdPIsberg/vibetags | Instructions file | 25 | today | MIT | A | 281 | GitHub Copilot |
| vibetags com-example-service-TransactionalPaymentService.instructions.mdPIsberg/vibetags | Instructions file | 25 | today | MIT | A | 104 | GitHub Copilot |
| vibetags com-example-config-AsyncTestConfig.instructions.mdPIsberg/vibetags | Instructions file | 25 | today | MIT | A | 82 | GitHub Copilot |
| vibetags com-example-concurrent-SessionCache.instructions.mdPIsberg/vibetags | Instructions file | 25 | today | MIT | A | 71 | GitHub Copilot |
| vscode buildNext.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode | Instructions file | 195k | today | MIT | A | 9,719 | GitHub Copilot |