engine-manage

engine-manage is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from kurtosis-tech/kurtosis. It costs 54 tokens per session (565 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A set of commands for managing the Kurtosis engine, the server that runs Kurtosis environments. It covers engines running with Docker or Kubernetes, a system for running containers across machines.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to check engine health and version, read logs, switch between Docker and Kubernetes, and recover from startup or API problems.
Why use it?
It gives you one place to start, stop, restart, inspect, and troubleshoot the engine when it is unavailable or behaving incorrectly.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to check engine health and version, read logs, switch between Docker and Kubernetes, and recover from startup or API problems.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kurtosis-tech/kurtosis/engine-manage
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add kurtosis-tech/kurtosis --skill engine-manage
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kurtosis-tech/kurtosis

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote 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.

agentmods badge for engine-manage

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kurtosis-tech/kurtosis/engine-manage/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kurtosis-tech/kurtosis/engine-manage)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kurtosis-tech/kurtosis/engine-manage"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kurtosis-tech/kurtosis/engine-manage/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for engine-manage

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kurtosis-tech/kurtosis/engine-manage"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kurtosis-tech/kurtosis/engine-manage.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 54 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 565 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00054 $0.00565
Opus 5 $0.00027 $0.00282
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00113
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00056

Measured 9d ago against content hash 34a34b8b3d14, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

engine-manage 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 9d 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.

skills/engine-manage/SKILL.md · 99 lines

What it actually says

Engine Manage

Manage the Kurtosis engine server lifecycle.

Status

kurtosis engine status

Shows whether the engine is running and its version.

Start

# Start with default settings
kurtosis engine start

# Start with debug images
kurtosis --debug-mode engine start

On Kubernetes, the engine runs as a pod in a kurtosis-engine-* namespace. You also need to run kurtosis gateway to access it from your local machine.

Stop

kurtosis engine stop

Restart

kurtosis engine restart

Equivalent to stop + start. Useful after changing cluster settings or upgrading.

View logs

kurtosis engine logs

Dumps engine server logs. Useful for diagnosing startup failures or API errors.

Docker vs Kubernetes

# Check which backend is active
kurtosis cluster get

# Switch to Docker
kurtosis cluster set docker
kurtosis engine restart

# Switch to Kubernetes
kurtosis cluster set kubernetes
kurtosis engine restart
kurtosis gateway  # Required for k8s

Engine on Kubernetes

When running on Kubernetes:

# The engine runs in its own namespace
kubectl get ns | grep kurtosis-engine

# Check engine pod
kubectl get pods -n <engine-namespace>

# View engine logs directly
kubectl logs <engine-pod> -n <engine-namespace>

# Start the gateway (required for local CLI to reach k8s engine)
kurtosis gateway &

Common issues

Symptom Fix
No Kurtosis engine is running Run kurtosis engine start
Engine starts but engine status shows nothing (k8s) Start the gateway: kurtosis gateway
Version mismatch warning kurtosis engine restart to match CLI version
Engine start hangs (k8s) Check pods: kubectl get pods -A | grep kurtosis
Old engine blocking new start kurtosis engine stop then clean namespaces
Changes

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.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 99 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A 34a34b8b3d14

Subscribe to this mod's changes

engine-manage is a skill published in the GitHub repository kurtosis-tech/kurtosis (551 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 565 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 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.

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