Installing a Claude Code plugin

Claude Code plugins bundle skills, agents, hooks and MCP servers. The official anthropics/claude-plugins-official marketplace is added automatically the first time Claude Code starts interactively.

Checking or manually adding the Claude Code marketplace

If Claude Code couldn't register the marketplace automatically, for example because your network blocks the download:

/plugin marketplace add anthropics/claude-plugins-official

Browsing available Claude Code plugins

/plugin

opens the interactive plugin manager with Discover, Installed, Marketplaces and Errors tabs.

Installing a Claude Code plugin

Directly from the command line, using the Code Review plugin as an example:

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

Claude Code then asks for a scope: User (across all your own projects), Project (for everyone collaborating on this repository, written to .claude/settings.json), or Local (for yourself only, in this repository).

Activating the plugin

If the install reports "Plugin is now active.", there's nothing further to do. If it instead reports "Run /reload-plugins to activate.":

/reload-plugins

Using the plugin

A plugin's commands are named after the plugin, so the Code Review plugin provides /code-review, run directly on a pull-request branch.

Uninstalling a plugin

If a plugin is no longer needed, select and remove it via the interactive plugin manager (/plugin, Installed tab). For project-wide installations written to .claude/settings.json, it's also worth checking that file directly to confirm the entry was actually removed and doesn't reappear on a fresh checkout of the repository.

Adding your own marketplaces

Besides the official Anthropic marketplace, any GitHub repository can be registered as a marketplace of its own, provided it follows the expected directory structure. This is useful for teams developing internal plugins and distributing them via a private repository instead of publishing them publicly. The command follows the same pattern as the official marketplace, just with your own repository path instead of anthropics/claude-plugins-official.

Common plugin installation issues

If a plugin provides no commands after installation, /reload-plugins usually resolves it, since Claude Code doesn't always fully load new plugins immediately. If installation fails with a network error, it's often a firewall or proxy blocking access to GitHub — in that case, check marketplace network access before retrying the installation.

Distributing plugins across a team

For teams that want to use the same plugins project-wide, installing with the Project scope is recommended, since the entry lands in .claude/settings.json and is version-controlled with the repository. That way every team member automatically gets the same plugin configuration on their next checkout, without repeating the installation manually.

This scope choice matters most for teams standardizing on shared tooling like the Code Review plugin, where consistent enforcement across contributors is the whole point.

Source: code.claude.com/docs/en/discover-plugins and github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official, checked on 2026-09-03.