Sometimes the MCP server you want your team to use already exists — published to a registry, a GitHub repo, or a container image by someone else. You do not need to fork it or vendor its source into your plugin. A Claude Code plugin can be pure configuration: a .mcp.json that tells Claude Code how to launch that external server over stdio, wrapped in a manifest and a marketplace so a teammate installs it with one command. ...
A Claude Code plugin can ship an MCP server the same way it ships a command or a hook: drop a .mcp.json at the plugin root, and Claude Code starts the server for anyone who installs the plugin. The user runs no pip install, edits no config, and copies no path. They install the plugin, and the server’s tools appear. The trick that makes this painless is launching the server with uv run --script against a file that declares its own dependencies inline (PEP 723). The consumer needs only uv on their PATH; uv builds an ephemeral environment with the right packages on first run. No committed virtualenv, nothing to install ahead of time. ...
A Claude Code plugin is a directory with a .claude-plugin/plugin.json manifest that bundles the things you would otherwise drop into ~/.claude/ by hand: slash commands, subagents, hooks, skills, and MCP servers. Wrapping them in a plugin turns a pile of personal config into one versioned artifact that a teammate installs with a single command, namespaced so it never collides with their own setup. This tutorial builds one plugin that uses three of those surfaces at once, then distributes it through GitHub: ...
A Claude Code skill is a SKILL.md file plus optional supporting files that teach Claude a repeatable procedure. Kept in ~/.claude/skills/ or a project’s .claude/skills/, a skill is personal or project-local. To hand one to a teammate, ship it across every project, or publish it to the community, you wrap it in a plugin and list that plugin in a marketplace that others can add with one command. This tutorial builds a real skill, packages it as a plugin, catalogs it in a marketplace, validates the manifests with the claude CLI, tests it locally, and distributes it through GitHub. The end result is a repository anyone can install with /plugin marketplace add your-org/your-repo followed by /plugin install. ...