Reference

These reference guides provide technical background that may be required to use Workshop and SDKcraft.

Command-line interfaces

Workshop and SDKcraft ship with a small set of command-line tools:

• sdk (CLI)
• sdkcraft (CLI)
• workshop (CLI)
• workshopctl (CLI)

Definition file formats

Workshops and SDKs are defined in YAML and share a number of basic elements such as plugs, base images and so on. However, both definition types have different purposes and structure:

• SDK definition
• Workshop definition

Structure and behavior

Workshops are largely made of SDKs; understanding how a workshop runs and the status it carries starts with how SDKs are structured and operated at run-time:

• SDK internals
• Workshop internals
• Workshop status diagrams

AI agents

Workshop exposes documentation in LLM-readable form and ships two agentic skills that wrap its CLIs for coding agents:

• Workshop and AI agents

Reference implementations

These real-life examples on GitHub, maintained by the Workshop team, are meant to showcase different SDK patterns and workshop implementations. Study them to better understand SDK design and workshop creation:

• https://github.com/canonical/reference-sdks

• https://github.com/canonical/reference-workshops