Copilot plugins!
As developers, we love customizing our workflows. But as the number of custom workflows, instructions, and tools grows, it can become incredibly hard to parse what exists and what is actually relevant to the task at hand. Suddenly, your workspace is cluttered with highly-specific commands and disconnected agents.
Enter Plugins.
What is a plugin?
A plugin is a packaged collection of customizations. Agents, skills, hooks, MCP, and LSP servers centered around a single persona.
For example, the Goose Plugin gives you everything you need to embody the spirit of a chaotic goose in your workspace: angry avian agents, bug-crunching skills, and aggressive honks, I mean hooks.
Why are plugins useful?
The primary benefit of plugins is logical, persona-driven grouping.
Instead of having a massive, disorganized list of hundreds of skills and agents that apply to every possible scenario, plugins let you load a specific “persona” or toolset into your workspace. When you want to approach a problem with a specific lens (like a frontend React expert, a rigorous QA tester, or… a goose), you install that plugin. It keeps your development environment clean, focused, and contextualized.
The structure of a plugin
A plugin is simply a folder containing a manifest and optional capabilities: See the documentation for structure sharable across Copilot and Claude Code
my-plugin/
├── plugin.json # Required manifest
├── agents/ # Custom agents (optional)
│ └── helper.agent.md
├── skills/ # Skills (optional)
│ └── deploy/
│ └── SKILL.md
├── hooks.json # Hook configuration (optional)
└── .mcp.json # MCP server config (optional)
How to install plugins
Plugins are designed to be easily shareable and installable whether you are using the Copilot CLI or VS Code.
Copilot CLI
You can quickly install plugins from various sources directly in the CLI using the /plugin command:
- From a marketplace: /plugin install my-plugin@my-marketplace
- From a GitHub repo: /plugin install owner/repo
- From a subdirectory: /plugin install owner/repo:path/to/plugin
- From a full URL: /plugin install https://github.com/owner/repo
VS Code
- Ensure that the setting chat.plugins.enabled is set to true in your VS Code settings.
- Open the Command Palette and run Chat: Install Plugin From Source.
- Open the Agent Customizations editor, navigate to the Plugins page, and click the + button.
- Enter the Git repository URL (for example, https://github.com/petercort/goose-plugin).
- VS Code will automatically clone and install the plugin for you.
Once installed, your agents, skills, and hooks are ready to go. Whether you’re configuring a complex dev-ops deployment flow or just wanting to HONK at your own code, plugins package it all up neatly.
Happy coding (and honking)!