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How do Claude plugins distribute skills and connectors to a team, and how do updates reach installed users?

Last updated 2026-08-25 · Confidence: documented — Anthropic’s Cowork docs, help center and Claude Code docs, plus the knowledge-work-plugins repo; the Cowork refresh cadence is unstated and the private-repo limit reported.

A plugin is a folder of skills plus an .mcp.json of connectors, hosted in a GitHub repo that Cowork and Claude Code both install from; pushes reach users on their next marketplace refresh, which is manual in Cowork unless an org Owner provisions the plugin, and off by default for third-party marketplaces in Claude Code.

One folder: skills, connectors, agents, hooks

Section titled “One folder: skills, connectors, agents, hooks”

Cowork’s plugin docs list four components — skills, connectors (MCP servers), agents, hooks — installable in Cowork and Code. Anthropic’s knowledge-work-plugins repo is the template: each plugin holds .claude-plugin/plugin.json, skills/, commands/, and .mcp.json. Its .mcp.json entries are remote URLs ("type": "http", "url": "https://mcp.slack.com/mcp"); Gmail and Calendar sit there with empty URLs, and Cowork prompts the user to sign in when a bundled connector needs auth. For what goes in the skills themselves see Skills vs prompts.

Cowork: individuals add the repo, Owners provision it

Section titled “Cowork: individuals add the repo, Owners provision it”

Anyone adds a repo under Customize › Plugins › Add marketplace as owner/repo; Cowork’s sync runs server-side without the user’s credentials, so plugin repos it points at must be public. Org-wide distribution is the reverse: only Owners and Primary Owners on Team/Enterprise can add a GitHub marketplace under Organization settings › Plugins, the repo must be private or internal with the Claude GitHub App installed, and each plugin is set to installed-by-default, available, hidden, or required (see Sharing with teammates for the same Owner gate elsewhere).

Updates: manual refresh, or a version bump on the default branch

Section titled “Updates: manual refresh, or a version bump on the default branch”
  • Personal marketplaces: “Click Update on a marketplace to pull the latest plugins”; Cowork also “checks for plugin updates” on its own, at a cadence the docs don’t give.
  • Org marketplaces: automatic sync runs when a PR “that includes a plugin version bump is merged to the repository’s default branch”, or on the admin’s Update button; syncs take up to 30 minutes.
  • Claude Code: claude plugin marketplace add owner/repo then claude plugin install name@marketplace; auto-update runs within ten minutes of launch but is off by default for third-party marketplaces, and a declared version that isn’t bumped keeps users on the cached copy. claude --plugin-dir ./folder loads the folder directly, /reload-plugins picks up edits.

Test the cadence: change one skill description without bumping version, note the push time, and check a teammate’s Cowork hourly with and without pressing Update.

Sources

Section titled “Sources”