Am I missing something? I don't see the point of iCloud for Automator if I have to duplicate the services to ~/Library/Services in order to use them.
Unfortunately, this still seems to be the case as of this posting.
I, too, have elected to use symlinks as a workaround. In the spirit of automation, I have a Folder Action monitoring the iCloud Automator directory ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~Automator/Documents
The action simply consists of one 'Run Shell Script' action, running /bin/bash
passing input as arguments:
# Remove all existing symlinks in ~/Library/Services
find "$HOME/Library/Services" -maxdepth 1 -type l -delete
# For each item currently in ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~Automator/Documents
allservices=("$HOME/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~Automator/Documents/"*)
for f in "${allservices[@]}"; do
# Basename of item
bf=$(basename "$f")
# Exclude all .hidden files and other exclusions
if ! [[ $bf =~ ^\..*$|^Disabled$|^Workflows$ ]]; then
# Add symlink to ~/Library/Services
ln -s "$f" "$HOME/Library/Services/$bf"
fi
done
Admittedly a quick-n-dirty solution (non-production code), I make no promises for file names with obscure characters. The Folder Action is not triggered when a file is deleted, so whenever a file is added to the iCloud Automator directory, or when a file is renamed, the script simply clears and rebuilds the symlinks in the Services directory. That way any deleted service would eventually be properly mirrored as soon as the next service is added or renamed.
I know it's a few years too late, but I just found this thread searching for the same functionality.