The Example Manifests Repository

Every Smarter platform starts with a library of example resources, so that there is something to explore, copy and learn from on a fresh installation: LLMClients that range from a bare model to a completely styled, governed application, plugins of every kind, guardrails, MCP clients, Proxies, self-hosted models, vector stores and budgets. Their manifests are not part of the Smarter platform. They live in their own community-supported GitHub repository, smarter-sh/example-manifests, where anyone can read them, copy them into a project of their own, and propose new ones.

The Repository

Each folder holds the manifests of one kind of resource.

Folder	Resources
`llm-clients/`	LLMClients, e.g. `simple`, `calculator`, `weather`, `research_analyst`, `data_analyst` and `customer_support`.
`plugins/static/`, `plugins/skill/`, `plugins/websearch/`, `plugins/image-search/`	Plugins: Static, Skill, Websearch and ImageSearch plugins.
`guardrails/`	Guardrails for inputs and outputs.
`mcp-clients/`	MCPClients for public MCP servers, and, as manifest templates, `*.yaml.tpl`, for the Smarter Project MCP server.
`proxies/`	Proxies, one per built-in Provider.
`llmhosts/`, `llmhost-computes/`	LLMHosts, self-hosted open-weight models, and the LLMHostCompute node groups that they run on.
`vectorstores/`	VectorStores.
`custom-domains/`	A CustomDomain, `example.com`.
`budgets/`	Budgets. Each is detached, `resources: []`, with the resources that it could be attached to as a commented-out example.

Its pre-commit hooks check every manifest against the JSON Schema of its kind, which the Smarter platform publishes, before each commit, and a GitHub Actions workflow runs them on every pull request.

How a Platform Loads It

manage.py load_from_github clones a GitHub repository of manifests and applies each of them, in the order of their kinds’ dependencies, SAMKinds.apply_order(). Some examples need a resource that only the platform’s operator can create, e.g. the Secret that holds an MCPClient’s access token for a third-party service, or the ApiConnection of a managed vector database. With --skip_missing_references, which both initialization commands pass, such a manifest is skipped, with a warning, until that resource exists, and the next initialization applies it. Any other manifest that fails is reported, and doesn’t stop the others.

manage.py initialize_platform applies the whole repository, owned by the Smarter admin, so that every account may use its resources, and deploys its LLMClients, except in the local environment. It does so after manage.py initialize_providers, manage.py install_official_extensions and manage.py initialize_vectorstore_providers, whose Providers, Secrets and Extensions the examples use, and before the Stackademy example project. The example CustomDomain is applied without starting its verification.
manage.py initialize_account gives each account its own copy of the example plugins and LLMClients, and deploys them, with --include_kind, which applies only the kinds that it names. --exclude_kind does the opposite.
A Budget whose manifest lists no spec.resources is created detached, once. If the Budget exists, it is left as it is, so the resources that a superuser attached it to, and their changes to it, survive the next initialization.

python manage.py load_from_github --url https://github.com/smarter-sh/example-manifests --include_kind LLMClient --deploy

See load_from_github and initialize_platform.

Contributing an Example

To change an example, or add one, open a pull request on smarter-sh/example-manifests. Put the manifest in the folder of its kind, install the repository’s pre-commit hooks, and commit: the hooks validate it against its kind’s JSON Schema, as the pull request’s checks do. Every platform picks up the merged change the next time that it is initialized, e.g. on its next deployment.