Local marketplace \ plugins testing

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Plugins | Cursor Docs the instruction here is absolutely not working on Cursor 3.17.19

Steps to Reproduce

What we see in the documentation:

Test plugins locally
Before you publish, load either plugin format from ~/.cursor/plugins/local:

Create a folder for your plugin: ~/.cursor/plugins/local/my-plugin
Copy your plugin files into that folder. Include either a root plugin.json for an Agent Plugin or .cursor-plugin/plugin.json for a Cursor Plugin.
Restart Cursor, or run Developer: Reload Window.
Verify your plugin components load in Cursor, such as rules, skills, or MCP servers.
For faster iteration, symlink your plugin repository:


ln -s /path/to/my-plugin ~/.cursor/plugins/local/my-plugin

After doing this setup, I see the following on file system:

cat  ~/.cursor/plugins/local/gameops-payments-role-architect/.cursor-plugin/plugin.json 
{
  "name": "gameops-payments-role-architect",
  "description": "Payments stream HLD and ADR authoring (hld-author, hld-designer, adr-author) and Confluence-aligned architecture rules",
  "version": "0.0.8",
  "author": {
    "name": "Payments (GameOps)"
  },
  "rules": [
    "rules/*.md"
  ],
  "skills": "./skills/",
  "commands": "./commands/",
  "hooks": "./hooks/cursor/hooks.json"
}

But cursor agent see nothing in context. Several restarts doesn’t help

Expected Behavior

Locally linked plugin will work

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Version: 3.17.19
VS Code Extension API: 1.128.0
Commit: ae3a2b7231dd56194447fe4570dfdc61640b1e90
Date: 2026-08-24T06:42:14.583Z
Layout: Agent Window
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 40.10.3
Chromium: 144.0.7559.236
Node.js: 24.15.0
V8: 14.4.258.32-electron.0
xterm.js: 6.1.0-beta.291
OS: Darwin arm64 25.6.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

5

Hey @Barys_Biankouski, thanks for the report!

Your plugin looks correct, what you’re running into is a team policy rather than a problem with your setup.

On Enterprise teams, loading plugins from ~/.cursor/plugins/local is controlled by an org admin setting, and it’s currently disabled for your organization (it’s off by default on Enterprise). When it’s off, Cursor skips that folder entirely and silently, which is why restarts don’t help. To unblock local plugin testing, ask your Cursor org admin to enable local plugin imports under Team Settings → Marketplace and Plugins → Allow Local Plugin Imports

One more tip for once that’s enabled: copy your plugin folder into ~/.cursor/plugins/local rather than symlinking it! Symlinks pointing outside that folder currently aren’t picked up.