What is Plugin marketplace?

In Claude Code, a marketplace is a catalog rather than a store with its own infrastructure. It is a directory or repository containing a .claude-plugin/marketplace.json file. The file must declare the marketplace's name, its owner and a plugins array, and each plugin entry needs a name and a source that says where Claude Code should fetch the plugin.

Sources can be a relative path inside the marketplace, a GitHub repository, a subdirectory of another repository, a git URL, a zip archive over HTTPS, an npm package, or a directory produced by a command. A user registers a marketplace with the claude plugin marketplace add command and installs with an id made of the plugin name, an at-sign and the marketplace name. The docs say the repository can be private and that an administrator can require a marketplace on every machine.

The docs include a validate command that checks JSON syntax, required fields and naming rules, but some problems, such as a relative path to a missing directory, only show up when a plugin is installed. Keep the entry name in marketplace.json identical to the name in the plugin's own manifest, because installs by the manifest name fail when the two differ. Marketplace names that Anthropic reserves for its official catalogs are refused.