Plugin System

ARC supports plugins that extend its capabilities with new adapters, hooks, skills, MCP servers, and dashboard widgets. Plugins are installed into ~/.arc/plugins/ and managed through the CLI.

Installing a Plugin

Plugins are distributed as directories containing a plugin.json manifest. Install from a local path:

arc plugins install ./my-plugin

ARC copies the plugin into ~/.arc/plugins/<name>/, validates the manifest, and enables it automatically.

Listing Installed Plugins

arc plugins list
arc plugins list --json

The table shows each plugin's name, version, enabled state, capabilities, and install date.

Enabling and Disabling

Disable a plugin without removing it, or re-enable it later:

arc plugins disable my-plugin
arc plugins enable my-plugin

Disabled plugins remain on disk but are not loaded at runtime.

Uninstalling

arc plugins uninstall my-plugin

This removes the plugin directory and its registry entry.

Plugin Manifest Format

Every plugin requires a plugin.json in its root directory:

{
  "name": "my-plugin",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "Adds custom linting hooks to ARC",
  "author": "your-name",
  "capabilities": ["hook"],
  "compatibility": { "arc": "^0.1.0" },
  "entryPoint": "index.js"
}

Required Fields

Field	Type	Description
name	string	Unique plugin identifier
version	string	SemVer version
description	string	Human-readable summary
capabilities	string[]	What the plugin provides
compatibility.arc	string	SemVer range of compatible ARC versions

Capabilities

A plugin declares one or more capabilities:

Capability	Description
adapter	New agent tool adapter
hook	Custom hook for the supervision pipeline
skill	Reusable skill definition
mcp	MCP server integration
dashboard	Web dashboard widget

Web Dashboard Plugin Management

The Web Dashboard Plugins view displays real plugin data from the registry and supports enable/disable actions directly from the browser:

• Browse — view all installed plugins with name, version, capabilities, and enabled state
• Enable/Disable — toggle a plugin's enabled state without removing it

TIP

Plugin install and uninstall operations are CLI-only. Use the Web Dashboard for quick enable/disable toggling when monitoring remotely.

Compatibility Checking

ARC validates the compatibility.arc field against the running ARC version before loading a plugin. Supported range formats are exact versions (1.2.3) and caret ranges (^1.2.0).

Storage

Plugins are stored in ~/.arc/plugins/. The registry is tracked in ~/.arc/plugins/installed.json. See the examples/ directory in the ARC repository for sample plugin structures.