Hosting Custom Plugin Indexes

Krew comes with a plugin index named default that points to the krew-index repository, which allows centralized discovery through community curation.

However, you can host your own plugin indexes (and possibly remove or replace the default index). Hosting your own plugin index is not recommended, unless you have a use case that specifically calls for it, such as:

• Your plugin is not accepted to krew-index
• You want full control over the distribution lifecycle of your own plugin
• You want to run a private plugin index in your organization (e.g. for installations on developer machines)

Hosting your own custom index is simple:

• Custom index repositories must be git repositories.
• Your clients should have read access to the repository. If the repository is not public, users can still authenticate to it with SSH keys or other gitremote-helpers installed on the client machine.
• The repository must contain a plugins/ directory at the root, with at least one plugin manifest in it. Plugin manifests should be directly in this directory (not in a subdirectory).
• Ensure plugin manifests are valid YAML and pass Krew manifest validation (optionally, you can use the validate-krew-manifest tool for static analysis).

Example plugin repository layout:

.
└── plugins/
    ├── plugin-a.yaml
    ├── plugin-b.yaml
    └── plugin-c.yaml