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Plugins allow you to extend Claude Code with custom functionality that can be shared across projects. Through the Agent SDK, you can programmatically load plugins from local directories to add capabilities to your agent sessions. A plugin can include:
  • Skills: capabilities Claude invokes autonomously when relevant. You can also invoke a plugin skill directly with /plugin-name:skill-name.
  • Agents: specialized subagents for specific tasks
  • Hooks: event handlers that respond to tool use and other events
  • MCP servers: external tool integrations via Model Context Protocol
For complete information on plugin structure and how to create plugins, see Plugins.

Loading plugins

Load plugins by providing their local file system paths in your options configuration. The type field must be "local", the only value the SDK accepts. The SDK supports loading multiple plugins from different locations. To use a plugin distributed through a marketplace or remote repository, download it first and provide the local directory path. For the directory layout a plugin needs, see the Plugin structure reference below.

Path specifications

Plugin paths can be:
  • Relative paths: resolved relative to your current working directory (for example, "./plugins/my-plugin")
  • Absolute paths: full file system paths (for example, "/home/user/plugins/my-plugin")
The path should point to the plugin’s root directory: the parent of skills/, agents/, hooks/, commands/, or .claude-plugin/.

Verifying plugin installation

When plugins load successfully, they appear in the system initialization message. You can verify that your plugins are available: