Claude Plugin Descriptions: 7 Best Practices from the Anthropic Community Repository

The most effective Claude plugin descriptions begin with a concise one-sentence purpose, list key capabilities and API integrations, include specific trigger phrases, define scope exclusions, and explicitly state privacy practices—following patterns proven in the anthropics/claude-plugins-community repository.

Writing a compelling plugin description is not just marketing fluff—it directly impacts discoverability, model triggering accuracy, and user trust. In the anthropics/claude-plugins-community repository, the highest-quality plugins follow a consistent structural pattern that balances human readability with machine-friendly precision. This guide breaks down the seven best practices extracted from production-ready examples.

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Start with a Concise Purpose Statement

The first sentence of your description must communicate the plugin's core function without ambiguity. The TRES Finance plugin demonstrates this perfectly:

"The first official TRES Finance plugin for Claude Code — blockchain accounting workflows, ledger management, and transaction analysis."

This single line in tres-finance-plugin/.claude-plugin/plugin.json accomplishes three things: identifies the plugin category, names the specific domain (blockchain accounting), and hints at primary capabilities. Avoid front-loading with technical implementation details or lengthy setup instructions.

---

List Key Capabilities and Primary APIs

After the purpose statement, enumerate the main actions your plugin enables. The QuickDesign skill in quickdesign/skills/quickdesign/SKILL.md provides a model example:

description: |
  Generate AI media — UGC promo videos, image edits, product creatives, video upscales — through Seedance, Kling, Sora2, Nano Banana, and GPT Image.

Note the pattern: action verbs (generate, edit, upscale) paired with specific tool names. This helps Claude's retrieval system match user intent to your plugin's actual functionality. Generic claims like "handles various media tasks" perform worse than explicit capability lists.

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Include Explicit Trigger Phrases

The most discoverable plugins document the exact utterances that should activate them. The tres-upload-tx-header-validation skill in tres-finance-plugin/skills/tres-upload-tx-header-validation/SKILL.md implements this as a bulleted list within the description:

• "fix my CSV headers"
• "bulk transaction upload failed"
• "missing required columns"

# Example: Skill description with trigger phrases

description: |
  Validate and repair CSV headers for TRES Finance transaction uploads.
  Trigger phrases: "fix my CSV headers", "bulk transaction upload failed", "missing required columns".

These phrases train Claude's relevance model to surface your plugin when users express related needs—even with varying wording.

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Define Scope and Exclusions Explicitly

Prevent accidental invocations by stating what your plugin does not do. The same TRES Finance CSV skill clarifies boundaries:

"This skill does not handle contacts import or wallet uploads."

This exclusionary statement appears directly in tres-finance-plugin/skills/tres-upload-tx-header-validation/SKILL.md. Explicit negative scope reduces false-positive triggers and manages user expectations before they attempt unsupported operations.

---

Reference Privacy and Telemetry Practices

User trust depends on transparent data handling. The repository's root README.md establishes a standard:

This plugin collects **no usage telemetry**.

For plugins requiring API keys or external services, disclose this explicitly. The testdino plugin in testdino/.claude-plugin/plugin.json pairs minimal descriptions with clear configuration requirements:

{
  "name": "testdino",
  "description": "Run TestDino-powered test analysis directly in Claude Code. No data leaves your environment.",
  "userConfig": [
    {
      "name": "TESTDINO_API_KEY",
      "description": "Your TestDino API key for test result analysis."
    }
  ]
}

---

Use Plain Markdown Without Formatting Artifacts

The Claude marketplace renders descriptions as plain markdown. Avoid these common mistakes:

• Backticks for code terms (the renderer may display them literally)
• HTML tags (stripped or garbled in display)
• Excessive markup (bold, italics, headers within the description field)

Keep descriptions as simple text paragraphs or minimal bullet lists. The plugin.json and SKILL.md files in the repository consistently follow this constraint.

---

Respect Character Limits While Maintaining Completeness

Platform constraints typically enforce 200–300 character limits for summary descriptions, with extended fields available for detailed capability lists. Structure your content hierarchically:

Field	Purpose	Length Target
description (plugin.json)	One-sentence purpose	~120 characters
description (SKILL.md)	Capabilities, triggers, exclusions	~300 characters

The QuickDesign example achieves this density without sacrificing clarity:

description: |
  CLI for AI media generation: UGC videos, image edits, product creatives, upscales via Seedance, Kling, Sora2, Nano Banana, GPT Image.

---

Complete Working Example

Combine all practices into a production-ready template:

// plugin.json — top-level plugin description
{
  "name": "weather-lookup",
  "description": "Add real-time weather lookup to Claude Code using OpenWeather API. No telemetry collected.",
  "repository": "https://github.com/your-org/weather-lookup",
  "userConfig": [
    {
      "name": "OPENWEATHER_API_KEY",
      "description": "Your OpenWeather API key (obtain at https://openweathermap.org/api)"
    }
  ]
}

<!-- skills/current-weather/SKILL.md — individual skill description -->
description: |
  Retrieve current weather conditions for any city worldwide.
  
  Trigger phrases: "what's the weather in [city]", "current temperature in [city]", "weather now in [city]".
  
  Capabilities: Temperature, humidity, wind speed, visibility, atmospheric pressure.
  
  Exclusions: Does not provide forecasts (use the `weather-forecast` skill), historical data, or severe weather alerts.

---

Summary

Effective Claude plugin descriptions follow a proven structure derived from the anthropics/claude-plugins-community repository:

• Lead with purpose: One sentence stating what the plugin does
• Enumerate capabilities: Specific APIs and actions enabled
• Document triggers: Exact phrases that should activate the skill
• Bound the scope: Explicit statements about what is not supported
• Disclose privacy: Clear telemetry and data handling statements
• Format plainly: Simple markdown without HTML or backtick-heavy code
• Respect limits: Concise summaries with extended detail where appropriate

---

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes a Claude plugin description different from general software documentation?

Claude plugin descriptions serve dual audiences: human users browsing the marketplace and Claude's retrieval-augmented generation system selecting which skill to invoke. Unlike general documentation, they must include trigger phrases that match natural language queries and scope exclusions that prevent misfires. The anthropics/claude-plugins-community repository demonstrates that successful descriptions optimize for semantic search relevancy, not just readability.

How long should a Claude plugin description be?

Aim for 120 characters for the core description field in plugin.json and up to 300 characters for skill-level descriptions in SKILL.md files. The TRES Finance and QuickDesign examples in the repository achieve completeness within these constraints by prioritizing action verbs, tool names, and trigger phrases over explanatory prose.

Should I include API implementation details in the description?

No. Reserve technical implementation details for documentation or configuration schemas. The description should answer what the plugin enables and when to use it, not how it works internally. The QuickDesign skill mentions external APIs (Seedance, Kling, Sora2) only as capability indicators, not architectural documentation.

Where exactly should trigger phrases appear in a Claude plugin?

Trigger phrases belong in the description field of skill-level SKILL.md files (located at skills/{skill-name}/SKILL.md), not in the top-level plugin.json. The tres-upload-tx-header-validation/SKILL.md file provides the canonical example, embedding phrases directly in the description text where Claude's relevance system can index them for matching.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "instagit": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "instagit@latest"]
    }
  }
}