Publish a plugin

Publishing makes a plugin installable from the registry. It lives in this plugin for now; the broader distribute workflow (rollout across repos, org distribution) is a larger surface that may absorb parts of this later. Only invoke this when the user explicitly wants to publish.

1. Confirm visibility, and ask

Never publish without an explicit yes, and confirm public vs private first. The private field in .tessl-plugin/plugin.json controls it:

• "private": true (default): only the workspace can see and install it.
• "private": false: anyone can discover and install it. This is irreversible, a public plugin cannot be made private again.

If the user is new to Tessl, be extra clear about what public means.

2. Handle provenance

If the plugin wraps skills the user did not author, do not publish on their behalf without making ownership clear. Wrapping and publishing someone else's work is a real sensitivity, surface it.

3. Lint and dry-run

Inspect the live CLI first (tessl plugin publish --help). Then:

tessl plugin lint <plugin-dir>
tessl plugin publish <plugin-dir> --dry-run

Fix all issues. Publishing requires Tessl auth (tessl login, or TESSL_TOKEN in CI). Published plugins should have evals (the internal bar is review and task-eval scores of 80%+); if they are missing, point the user at tessl/skill-optimizer first, evals are a separate, downstream flow.

4. Publish

tessl plugin publish <plugin-dir>

Bump the version each release (--bump patch|minor|major, or edit version).

Undo

• tessl plugin unpublish works only within 2 days.
• tessl plugin archive is the normal way to retire a plugin: blocks new installs, keeps existing ones working.

When to stop

Stop when the plugin is published at the intended visibility, or the user chooses to keep it local.