Agent plugins from internal repositories (marketplace) are not accessible on Copilot Cloud Agent

[ViacheslavKudinov]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Copilot Cloud Agent

Body

Hi,
I have created in .github-private repo file with marketplace configuration:

 {
   "extraKnownMarketplaces": {
     "internal-marketplace": {
       "source": {
         "source": "github",
         "repo": "ORG/copilot-plugins"
       }
     }
   }
 }

and also the repository (internal visibility, not public) for Agent plugins ORG/copilot-plugins
where i have marketplace.json with something like

{
  "name": "internal-marketplace",
  "owner": {
    "name": "ORG",
    "email": "example@example.com"
  },
  "metadata": {
    "description": "Curated plugins",
    "version": "0.1.0"
  },
  "plugins": [
    {
      "name": "plugin",
      "description": "A plugin",
      "version": "0.1.0",
      "source": "./plugins/plugin"
    }
  ]
}

with folder for plugins and so on.

I can see the marketplace and plugin(s) on Copilot clients (Copilot CLI, VSCode),
but not on Copilot Cloud Agent as one can't checkout the repository with plugins.

It make low sense for Enterprises if Agent can't checkout Agent plugins.

Is it known limitation or any workaround is there ?

Thank you in advance.

[Reznouw]

This sounds like a current limitation of Copilot Cloud Agent rather than an issue with your marketplace.json.

If the same internal marketplace is visible from Copilot CLI and VS Code, then the marketplace configuration itself is probably valid. The difference seems to be that Copilot Cloud Agent does not have the same repository checkout/access path for internal plugin repositories, so it cannot resolve or load plugins whose source lives in an internal/private repo.

For enterprise use cases, I agree this is a significant gap. Internal agent plugins are exactly the kind of thing many organizations would not want to publish publicly.

A few things I would check first:

• Confirm the plugin repository is accessible to the same organization/account context used by Copilot Cloud Agent.
• Confirm the repository visibility is internal, not private to a narrower team.
• Confirm any required GitHub App or Copilot Agent permissions include access to that repository.
• Check whether Cloud Agent currently supports extraKnownMarketplaces from .github-private, or whether that support is only available in local clients like VS Code/CLI.

If those are all correct, then I think this needs confirmation from GitHub staff. The ideal behavior would be for Copilot Cloud Agent to be able to access internal marketplace repositories through organization-scoped permissions, or for the docs to clearly state that internal marketplaces are currently only supported by local clients.

So my current understanding is: no obvious workaround unless the plugin source is made accessible to the Cloud Agent environment, and this may need to be treated as a product limitation/feature request for enterprise internal plugin support.