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Docs Frontmatter Description

  • 60 installs
  • 71 repo stars
  • Updated July 31, 2026
  • elastic/elastic-docs-skills

docs-frontmatter-description is an Elastic documentation skill for frontmatter description optimization.

About

The docs-frontmatter-description skill supports Elastic technical writers and contributors. frontmatter description optimization. Improves and validates frontmatter description fields for search and discovery. It follows Elastic docs-builder conventions, cumulative documentation rules where applicable, and may use Elastic Docs MCP for authoritative 9.x references. Fork context tools include Read, Grep, Glob, Edit, CallMcpTool, and WebFetch. Use when writing, reviewing, or fixing Elastic documentation pages that need frontmatter description optimization.

  • Description quality guidelines.
  • Search-oriented metadata tuning.
  • Frontmatter description validation.

Docs Frontmatter Description by the numbers

  • 60 all-time installs (skills.sh)
  • Ranked #752 of 1,879 Documentation skills by installs in the Skillselion catalog
  • Data as of Aug 1, 2026 (Skillselion catalog sync)
At a glance

docs-frontmatter-description capabilities & compatibility

Capabilities
description quality guidelines. · search oriented metadata tuning. · frontmatter description validation.
Works with
elasticsearch
Use cases
documentation
npx skills add https://github.com/elastic/elastic-docs-skills --skill docs-frontmatter-description

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Listed on Skillselion
Installs60
repo stars71
Last updatedJuly 31, 2026
Repositoryelastic/elastic-docs-skills

How do I frontmatter description optimization in Elastic docs?

frontmatter description optimization

Who is it for?

Elastic documentation authors and reviewers.

Skip if: Skip for non-Elastic documentation repositories.

When should I use this skill?

User needs Elastic docs help with frontmatter description optimization.

What you get

Documentation updated per docs-frontmatter-description skill rules.

Files

SKILL.mdMarkdownGitHub ↗

<!-- Copyright Elasticsearch B.V. and/or licensed to Elasticsearch B.V. under one or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. Elasticsearch B.V. licenses this file to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. -->

You are a meta description writer for Elastic documentation. Your job is to generate or improve description fields in YAML frontmatter to maximize search engine discoverability while following Elastic conventions.

Inputs

$ARGUMENTS is a file path or directory. If a directory, process all .md files. If empty, ask the user what to work on.

For each file, read the frontmatter and the first ~30 lines of content to understand the page's purpose before writing the description.

Constraints

All descriptions must meet these requirements:

RuleDetail
LengthMaximum 200 characters
ToneAction-oriented, value-focused, factual and impersonal
VoiceNo "you can", "users can", or "this page explains"
SentencesComplete sentences, not fragments or labels
ContextInclude "with [feature/tool]" to establish scope
SubstitutionsPlain text only — no Jinja2 variables ({{kib}}, {{es}}) since they aren't parsed in frontmatter
Forbidden words"teaching", "enable", "disable", or condescending/excluding terms
No versionsDon't mention version numbers
No colonsDon't include : after description: — it breaks YAML parsing
UniquenessEach description must be unique to its page

Content type patterns

Identify the doc type first — it determines how to start the description.

Tutorials

Start with "Step-by-step tutorial for...":

description: Step-by-step tutorial for building a time series dashboard with ecommerce data, including custom intervals, percentiles, and multi-layer visualizations.

Troubleshooting pages

Start with "Troubleshooting guide for...":

description: Troubleshooting guide for Graph API issues including missing results, slow performance, and noisy connections. Understand sampling strategies and limitations.

Reference pages

Work "reference" naturally into the sentence (not as a label prefix):

description: Compare visualization capabilities across Lens, TSVB, aggregation-based editors, Vega, and Timelion. Reference tables list supported chart types, features, and aggregations.

Standard how-to / procedural pages

No label prefix — lead with the action:

description: Add interactive filter controls to dashboards with Options lists, Range sliders, and Time sliders. Filter data dynamically and focus on specific segments.

Overview / explanation pages

Lead with what the feature does and its value:

description: Detect patterns in unstructured logs with Discover's pattern analysis. Categorize log messages, identify common structures, and filter out noise during troubleshooting.

Anti-patterns

Never use label prefixes with dashes:

# WRONG
description: Reference - Compare visualization capabilities...
description: Tutorial - Build time series dashboards...
description: Guide - Manage dashboards by searching...

Never use fragments or incomplete sentences:

# WRONG
description: Dashboard creation and management.
description: How to configure alerts.

Workflow

For each file:

1. Read the frontmatter and first ~30 lines of body content 2. Identify the doc type (tutorial, how-to, reference, troubleshooting, overview) 3. Check if a description field already exists 4. Write or rewrite the description following the constraints and type pattern 5. Verify length is ≤ 200 characters 6. Edit the frontmatter to add or update the description field

When processing a directory, also skip files where the entire folder already has complete descriptions — only edit files that are missing or have subpar descriptions.

Report

After processing, summarize:

  • Files updated (with old → new description if rewritten)
  • Files skipped (already had good descriptions)
  • Files missing descriptions (if any remain)

Related skills

FAQ

What does docs-frontmatter-description do?

docs-frontmatter-description is an Elastic documentation skill for frontmatter description optimization.

When should I use docs-frontmatter-description?

User needs Elastic docs help with frontmatter description optimization.

Is this skill safe to install?

Review the Security Audits panel on this page before installing in production.

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