You are reading the built-in manual

These are the pages AURA carries within itself: inside the application, the ? key opens the one for the screen you are on. They are published here exactly as they are, so they can be read without installing anything.

The installed plugins and the marketplaces they come from. A plugin brings in a batch of resources at once: skills, agents, hooks, MCP servers.

The screen reads two sources and writes only one:

• it reads plugins/installed_plugins.json and plugins/known_marketplaces.json, the inventory Claude Code keeps;
• it writes settings.json only — the declarative enabledPlugins and extraKnownMarketplaces keys.

The plugins/ folder itself I never write: it is managed by the CLI, which clones repositories and resolves dependencies in it.

Marketplaces

A marketplace is a catalogue of plugins. The list merges two views, which explains the three badges:

• built-in — the marketplace is in the Claude Code registry, with no declaration from you. The badge states an origin, not a protection: it removes like the others.
• added — it is both in the registry and declared in your settings.json (extraKnownMarketplaces). This is the normal state of a marketplace you added yourself.
• pending — it is declared in settings.json but absent from the registry: Claude Code has not materialised it yet. Nothing has been cloned.

Under the name are the source type and its location, as the registry records them (github, a local path, a repository URL…).

Adding

The field accepts the three forms the CLI understands: owner/repo, an https://…/repo.git URL, or a local path. Submitting writes nothing: I give you the exact command to run in Claude Code —

/plugin marketplace add <source>

— with a copy button. Claude Code is the one that will clone or copy the marketplace.

So there is no “install a plugin” action on this screen: you add the marketplace, then install from Claude Code.

Removing

The behaviour depends on the badge, and that is deliberate:

• a pending marketplace exists only as a declaration in settings.json: removing it from there is complete and correct. The removal is therefore immediate and local to the screen, to be confirmed by the diff like any other write.
• a real marketplace requires the /plugin marketplace remove <name> command, because it also uninstalls the plugins that come from it and deletes the local clone. If it was declared in your settings.json as well, a Remove from the config too button does the half that is yours.

Installed plugins

Each row carries the full name@marketplace identifier, its version and its scope, as the registry declares them.

Enabling, disabling

The selector writes into settings.json. The detail matters: a plugin is on by default, so

• Off writes enabledPlugins["name@marketplace"] = false;
• On deletes the key instead of writing true — and if it was the last one, the now-empty enabledPlugins object goes with it.

The file records only your departures from the default behaviour. Disabling uninstalls nothing: the files stay in plugins/, and turning it back on is immediate.

Uninstalling

The bin opens the /plugin uninstall <name@marketplace> command: uninstalling removes the plugin and clears its cache, which is Claude Code's business.

Saving

Enable/disable changes do not leave as you make them. They pile up in the screen — the unsaved pill says so — and Preview… opens the settings.json diff before writing. Reload drops what has not been applied and re-reads the file.

Worth knowing

A plugin can provide its own hooks. They do not appear in your settings.json: the Hooks module shows them separately, read-only, with the on/off state of the plugin that carries them.