After recent release of Cursor’s marketplace plugins, I was excited to try out and build a plugin for Scalekit (an auth stack for AI apps). I specifically first wanted to try releasing with one feature that allows developers using cursor to add auth to their MCP servers.
When I moved to testing the plugin, there are no clear docs on how to do this. Any help? I have some confidence because claude works out of the box with it perfectly. But want to test specific to cursor anyway.
I submitted the form on the cursor dashboard twice, over the period; but no progress, no email, no notifications nothing as of yet.
I can see over days other plugins becoming live. I wonder if I should be something else?
The publisher dashboard seems disabled.
I reached out to [email protected] and follow up for 5-6 times. Except for initial bot response moving to a collegue email, nothing help so far.
Now, seemingly tried all the options, posting it here as a last resort to see if I could can some help; else probably focus on something else for now.
Hey, thanks for building this and for the detailed write-up.
A few things that should help:
Testing your plugin locally: The Building Plugins docs explain the plugin structure and manifest format. For local testing, you can install your plugin from a local folder. Open Cursor Settings, go to the Plugins section, and point it to your local repo. This lets you confirm rules, skills, MCP servers, and more work before you submit.
On the submission and review process: The marketplace is currently curated. The team works directly with plugin authors and manually reviews every submission before listing it. That means it is not a self-serve flow yet, and turnaround time can vary. I know that does not help with the lack of communication though.
A couple of quick questions in the meantime:
About when did you first submit the form?
Which form did you use exactly? Was it on the publisher dashboard?
I’ll update here once I have more info from the team.
Thanks for throwing light on the marketplace listing. That’s very helpful, if you could any share inputs if I can work with the team to be become a partner?
I don’t remember the exact date, but I first followed up with cursor support over email for ([email protected]) it was on Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2026 10:35:10 +0530 and followed up through 27 Feb on same email thread. So it must be within the week before first email.
PS: Sorry for the delayed response, I have updated my notification preferences, should get back to you sooner.
@deanrie , we are ready to submit a plugin as well, but have the same question that @saif_shines did, namely that there’s no obvious place in Settings → Plugins to specify a local repository; this interface is just a list of suggested plugins along with a ‘Browse Marketplace’ button. Clicking this doesn’t provide a place to enter a local repository either.
Along with this, Plugins Reference | Cursor Docs doesn’t contain the guidance you’ve provided, or any guidance around testing really, other than checking to make sure that the plugin has been tested locally before submission.
Hey @saif_shines@rsb, sorry for the confusion in my earlier reply. The point to local repo option isn’t available in Settings. Here’s the correct way to test plugins locally:
Create the folder ~/.cursor/plugins/local/your-plugin-name
Copy your plugin files there and make sure .cursor-plugin/plugin.json is at the root
Restart Cursor or run Developer: Reload Window
Your plugin components rules, skills, and MCP servers should show up
For faster iteration, you can symlink your repo instead of copying:
@deanrie , your revised instructions are helpful. I have some findings and a couple of questions:
I use remote SSH for development. Since there are .cursor/ directories on both the local and remote machines, it wasn’t clear which one needed the plugin files, however I eventually worked out that remote was the correct location.
Symlinking the local plugin directory from the repo into ~/.cursor/plugins/local/ didn’t work, but copying the plugin directly did. Perhaps there’s a Cursor bug related to not traversing symlinks correctly?
After doing this, our plugin appeared under Settings → Plugins in a new section called ‘Installed’ above the ‘Suggested’ plugins from the Marketplace.
However, after plugin installation, trying to access plugin files such as the mcp.json via the IDE fails with the message “The editor could not be opened because the file was not found.” (ditto commands/setup.md and others). Oddly, Cursor does seem to read these files during plugin instantiation (as evidenced by using the MCP server URL), so this might be an IDE issue?
I experimented by adding a parallel copy of the plugin in the local machine’s .cursor/plugins/local/plugin-namedirectory to see if the IDE was trying to read these files from the local filesystem, but had the same error.
@rsb, thanks for the detailed findings, this is really helpful.
In order:
Symlinks: this is a confirmed bug. We updated the docs with symlink guidance, but in practice they don’t resolve correctly right now. The team is aware. For now, the workaround is to copy files directly, like you did.
File was not found when opening plugin files via Remote SSH: this looks like a new bug. From your description, Cursor can read the files when the plugin loads since the MCP server URL is picked up, but the IDE tries to open them from the wrong path. I’ll log this with the team. For context, can you share your Cursor version?
Remote SSH, plugin installed on the remote machine: glad you figured it out. That’s expected behavior, but I agree we should call it out in the docs.
Answer found for the below query: The version should be on 2.6+
—- @rsb where you able to test your plugin based on how @deanrie described? I don’t see it working.
Appreciate you reply @rsb . I think only thing I am worried about is marketplace listing our plugin. We have spent so much time and energy, just want to check whether if you found some help in this direction?
Hi @saif_shines , we just submitted ours this morning (in the spirit of sharing, this is our plugin, which provides persistent memory and shared context for AI tools: Create State - Cursor Plugin ).
I tried emailing the [email protected] address with a couple of questions before submitting, but never received a response, so just submitted anyway. My sense is that this forum is a better way to get answers and attention from the Cursor team.
Good luck with your plugin – it looks cool and useful!
