Claude Code plugin¶

ANCHOR ships as a Claude Code plugin. The plugin bundles two things:

the anchor MCP server, run via uvx so the published wheel is fetched on first use
the anchor skill, so Claude knows when to drive ANCHOR instead of writing its own PDF parsing code

It works in the Claude Code CLI and in the desktop app. You do not need to install the anchor CLI first.

Requirements¶

Claude Code with plugin support (run /plugin to check; update if the command is missing)
uv on your PATH. The plugin starts the MCP server with uvx --from anchor-kb anchor-mcp, so uv resolves and caches the anchor-kb wheel from PyPI on first run.

Install¶

Inside Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add Novia-RDI-Seafaring/anchor
/plugin install anchor@anchor

Restart Claude Code or run /reload-plugins. Then run /mcp and check that anchor is listed with its tools. The skill is available as /anchor:anchor, and Claude invokes it automatically when you work with engineering documents.

The first MCP call can take a while: uvx downloads the wheel and its dependencies once, then reuses the cache.

Update¶

/plugin marketplace update anchor

The plugin version follows ANCHOR releases. A new release on PyPI is picked up by uvx; the plugin manifest version is bumped in the same release commit.

Project resolution and the data dir¶

The plugin registers the MCP server without a baked data dir. The server resolves the active project from its working directory, so the normal flow is:

cd ~/my-project
anchor init        # optional: writes anchor.toml, picks the data dir
claude

Without a project, the server falls back to ANCHOR_DATA_DIR, then ~/anchor-data.

Some harness setups spawn the MCP server outside your project folder. The desktop app is the known case (see issue #95). The workaround is to pin the project explicitly with a user-level MCP entry instead of the plugin's default one:

claude mcp add anchor -- uvx --from anchor-kb anchor-mcp --project /path/to/project

A user-level server named anchor coexists with the plugin's server; disable the plugin's copy under /plugin if you pin one project this way.

The other install path: anchor install¶

If you already installed the CLI with uv tool install anchor-kb, the older path still works:

anchor install claude-code

It writes the same MCP entry and skill into your user config (~/.claude.json and ~/.claude/skills/anchor/). Pick one path. If you use both, Claude Code sees two anchor MCP servers and two copies of the skill, which wastes context and can confuse tool selection.

	Plugin marketplace	`anchor install claude-code`
Needs the CLI installed first	No (uvx fetches the wheel)	Yes
Updates	`/plugin marketplace update`	Re-run after upgrading
Works in the desktop app	Yes	Yes
Skill location	Plugin-managed	`~/.claude/skills/anchor/`

For Cursor, Codex, and other harnesses, see the agent configuration guide.

For maintainers¶

The plugin lives in plugins/anchor/; the marketplace catalog is .claude-plugin/marketplace.json at the repo root. The skill file plugins/anchor/skills/anchor/SKILL.md is generated from src/anchor/skills/. After editing those sources or bumping the version in pyproject.toml, regenerate and commit:

uv run python scripts/build_claude_plugin.py

Validate before merging:

claude plugin validate .
claude plugin validate ./plugins/anchor