Plugin Creator

Use this skill when a user wants a local Codewhale plugin bundle. Trusted and enabled bundles may add declarative Skills, commands, agents, hooks, and MCP servers (stdio and remote) through the existing engines. LSP, native extensions, filesystem roots, and lifecycle mutation are inventory-only.

Workflow

1. Pick a Codewhale-owned location:
   • User bundle: ~/.codewhale/plugins/<plugin-name>/
   • Workspace bundle: <workspace>/.codewhale/plugins/<plugin-name>/
2. Normalize the bundle name to lowercase hyphen-case.
3. Create plugin.toml:

schema_version = 1

[plugin]
name = "my-plugin"
version = "0.1.0"
description = "What this bundle provides"

[skills]
path = "skills"

4. Put each Skill under skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md. Codewhale exposes it as my-plugin:<skill-name>, never as an unqualified command.
5. Add [mcp_servers.<name>] only when the bundle needs an existing MCP engine. Keep stdio commands and paths inside the bundle. Map local environment values only as exact ${SOURCE_ENV} references. For remote MCP, use HTTPS (or loopback HTTP), forbid URL user information/query/fragment, use only environment-backed headers or bearer tokens, and declare the exact normalized endpoint host set in [capabilities].network_hosts. Never place credentials in the manifest.
6. Commands (commands/*.md), agents (agents/*.toml), and hooks (hooks/*.toml) activate under the current policy — workspace bundles win same-name collisions over user and built-in bundles. LSP, native extensions, filesystem roots, and lifecycle mutation are inventory-only: declare them only when inventorying future work. A bundle that declares only unsupported surfaces cannot be enabled.
7. Validate and review without executing bundle content:
   • /plugin validate <plugin-name>
   • /plugin show <plugin-name>
   • /plugin enable <plugin-name> to open the content/capability review
   • run the exact /plugin trust ... confirmation shown, then enable again
8. Verify /skills inspect reports plugin provenance and /plugin list reports the expected trust and activation state. Trust stages the reviewed content but does not activate it. After enablement, follow the host's reload notice: use /reload or a new session to apply changes to a live session's pinned skills and tools.

Every user and workspace bundle starts untrusted and disabled. Reuse the existing /plugin marketplace, install, update, review and reload surfaces; do not add a parallel installer, registry or automatic trust flow. Catalog membership alone never installs, trusts or enables a plugin.