Plugins

Plugins are installable packages that extend Claude Code with additional skills, agents, hooks, and tool integrations. Where a skill is a single reusable prompt you keep in your project, a plugin bundles multiple components together into a versioned, shareable unit that can be discovered and installed from a marketplace.

Plugins vs. skills vs. standalone config

All three mechanisms add capabilities to Claude Code, but they serve different scopes:

	Standalone (.claude/)	Skills	Plugins
Skill command names	/skill-name	/skill-name	/plugin-name:skill-name
Scope	One project	One project	Any project
Distribution	Manual copy	Manual copy	Marketplace install
Versioning	Not tracked	Not tracked	Semantic versioning
Best for	Personal experiments, project conventions	Reusable prompt templates	Shared team tooling, community distribution

Use standalone config and skills for things that are specific to a project or your own workflow. Use plugins when you want to share capabilities across projects, distribute to your team, or publish to the community.

Installing plugins

Plugins are installed via the /plugin command. The official Anthropic marketplace is available by default.

# Install a plugin from the official marketplace
/plugin install skill-creator@claude-plugins-official

# Browse available plugins interactively
/plugin

By default plugins install at user scope (available in all your projects). You can also install at project scope so the plugin is tracked in version control and shared with your team:

/plugin install formatter@claude-plugins-official --scope project

Managing installed plugins

/plugin uninstall plugin-name@marketplace
/plugin enable plugin-name@marketplace
/plugin disable plugin-name@marketplace
/plugin update plugin-name@marketplace

Adding more marketplaces

The official Anthropic marketplace comes pre-configured. You can add others, including private or self-hosted ones:

# GitHub repository
/plugin marketplace add your-org/your-plugins

# Git URL (GitLab, Bitbucket, etc.)
/plugin marketplace add https://gitlab.com/company/plugins.git

# Local path (useful during development)
/plugin marketplace add ./my-local-marketplace

Types of plugins

Language intelligence (LSP)

LSP plugins connect Claude Code to a language server, giving it real-time access to type information, go-to-definition, find-references, and live diagnostics for a specific language. Available for C/C++, C#, Go, Java, Kotlin, Lua, PHP, Python, Rust, Swift, and TypeScript.

These require the corresponding language server binary to be installed separately on your system.

External service integrations (MCP)

Integration plugins connect Claude Code to external tools and services via the Model Context Protocol. Claude can then call those services directly as tools during a session.

Available integrations include:

• Source control: GitHub, GitLab
• Project management: Atlassian (Jira + Confluence), Asana, Linear, Notion
• Design: Figma
• Infrastructure: Vercel, Firebase, Supabase
• Communication: Slack
• Monitoring: Sentry

Development workflow plugins

Workflow plugins bundle agents, skills, and hooks for specific development tasks. Examples from the official marketplace:

• commit-commands: Git commit workflow skills
• pr-review-toolkit: Pull request review agents
• plugin-dev: Toolkit for building your own plugins
• skill-creator: Create, refine, and benchmark new skills (see also GitHub Repos)

Output style plugins

Output style plugins adjust how Claude formats and presents its responses. For example, explanatory-output-style adds educational context to responses, and learning-output-style turns interactions into a more guided learning experience.

What a plugin contains

A plugin is a directory with a plugin.json manifest inside a .claude-plugin/ folder. Beyond the manifest, it can include any combination of:

• Skills (skills/): Prompt templates Claude loads when invoked
• Agents (agents/): Subagent definitions with specialized roles and preloaded skills
• Hooks (hooks/hooks.json): Event handlers that run on Claude Code lifecycle events (tool use, session start/end, etc.)
• MCP server config (.mcp.json): External service connections that start automatically when the plugin is enabled
• LSP server config (.lsp.json): Language server connections for code intelligence

A minimal plugin needs only the manifest. You add components based on what the plugin should do.

Recommended plugins for AI coding

These are the most practical plugins from the official marketplace for day-to-day AI-assisted development. Install at user scope unless your whole team should share the same setup.

Code quality and review

code-review

Adds review agents and skills that analyse code for bugs, security issues, and style problems. A good complement to the built-in review skills if you want more opinionated or structured output.

/plugin install code-review@claude-plugins-official

code-simplifier

Identifies over-engineered code and suggests simpler alternatives. Useful after an AI coding session where Claude may have written more code than necessary to solve the problem.

/plugin install code-simplifier@claude-plugins-official

security-guidance

Adds security-focused agents that check for common vulnerabilities (injection, auth issues, secrets in code) and explain how to fix them. Worth installing on any project that handles user data or external input.

/plugin install security-guidance@claude-plugins-official

pr-review-toolkit

Bundles pull request review agents that summarise diffs, flag regressions, and generate review comments in a structured format. Useful if you use Claude Code to assist with code reviews.

/plugin install pr-review-toolkit@claude-plugins-official

Git workflow

commit-commands

Adds skills for writing commit messages, checking staged diffs before committing, and enforcing commit conventions. Reduces the back-and-forth of asking Claude to write a commit message manually each time.

/plugin install commit-commands@claude-plugins-official

hookify

Connects Claude Code to Git hooks so you can trigger skills or agents automatically on pre-commit, post-commit, or push events. For example, run a security check before every commit without invoking it manually.

/plugin install hookify@claude-plugins-official

Language intelligence

Install the LSP plugin for your primary language. Each one connects Claude Code to the language's official language server, giving it access to real-time diagnostics, type information, and cross-file references.

Language	Plugin	Language server
TypeScript / JavaScript	typescript-lsp	typescript-language-server
Python	pyright-lsp	Pyright
Go	gopls-lsp	gopls
Rust	rust-analyzer-lsp	rust-analyzer
C#	csharp-lsp	csharp-language-server

/plugin install typescript-lsp@claude-plugins-official
/plugin install pyright-lsp@claude-plugins-official
/plugin install gopls-lsp@claude-plugins-official
/plugin install rust-analyzer-lsp@claude-plugins-official
/plugin install csharp-lsp@claude-plugins-official

Each LSP plugin requires the corresponding language server binary to be installed on your system first. Check the plugin README for setup instructions.

Feature development

feature-dev

A workflow plugin for structured feature development. Provides agents that help plan, scaffold, implement, and verify a feature end-to-end rather than handling each step ad hoc.

/plugin install feature-dev@claude-plugins-official

ralph-loop

Implements an iterative development loop where Claude proposes a solution, evaluates it, and refines it autonomously before presenting the result. Based on the Ralph Wiggum Loop pattern for reducing back-and-forth on complex tasks.

/plugin install ralph-loop@claude-plugins-official

External service integrations

github / gitlab

Let Claude Code interact with your repository directly: read issues, create pull requests, post comments, trigger workflows. Install whichever matches your source control host.

/plugin install github@claude-plugins-official
/plugin install gitlab@claude-plugins-official

playwright

Adds browser automation tools so Claude can write, run, and debug end-to-end tests using Playwright. Useful if you want Claude to verify UI behaviour as part of a feature implementation.

/plugin install playwright@claude-plugins-official

linear / supabase / firebase

Service-specific integrations for teams already using these platforms. Linear lets Claude read and update issues; Supabase and Firebase give Claude access to your backend services during development.

/plugin install linear@claude-plugins-official
/plugin install supabase@claude-plugins-official
/plugin install firebase@claude-plugins-official

Skill management

skill-creator

Helps you build and evaluate new skills. Useful once you outgrow the ready-to-use skills and want to create project-specific or team-specific ones. See also the GitHub Repos page for the source.

/plugin install skill-creator@claude-plugins-official

Creating a plugin

The quickest way to get started is to use the plugin-dev or skill-creator plugins from the official marketplace, which provide scaffolding and evaluation tooling. You can also test a plugin directory locally without installing it:

claude --plugin-dir ./my-plugin

The anthropics/claude-plugins-official repository on GitHub is the best reference for structure and conventions. The internal plugins developed by Anthropic follow the same specification that community plugins use.

To submit a plugin to the official marketplace, use the submission form at claude.ai/settings/plugins/submit.