Marketplace catalog unreachable via symlinked .claude-plugin path (breaks plugin-directory / `github://openhands/extensions`)

Summary

When the plugin-directory is configured with MARKETPLACE_SOURCE=github://openhands/extensions, the marketplace catalog does not render — the Plugin Directory shows an empty catalog.

Root cause: the catalog is exposed through a double symlink, and raw.githubusercontent.com does not dereference symlinks through directory paths.

How plugin-directory fetches the catalog

openhands/plugin-directory builds a hardcoded raw URL from the source config (server/app/services/marketplace_service.py):

CATALOG_PATH = ".claude-plugin/marketplace.json"
url = f"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/{owner}/{repo}/{ref}/{catalog_path}"

So it requests exactly:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openhands/extensions/main/.claude-plugin/marketplace.json

The symlink chain in this repo

Traced via the GitHub git Trees API (mode=120000 = symlink):

Verification

raw.githubusercontent.com serves the raw blob content stored in git. A symlink is stored as a blob whose content is the link-target text, and the raw server does not traverse symlinked directory paths:

• .claude-plugin/marketplace.json → HTTP 404 (symlinked directory not traversable)
• .plugin/marketplace.json → returns the literal string ../marketplaces/openhands-extensions.json (the symlink blob body), not the JSON catalog — so even if level 1 resolved, JSON parsing would fail
• marketplaces/openhands-extensions.json → HTTP 200, the real catalog JSON

As a result, plugin-directory's fetch_catalog() raises CatalogUnavailableError on the 404, the plugins list comes back empty, and nothing renders. This is a server-side (GitHub raw) limitation, not something the plugin-directory client can work around — the catalog simply never arrives.

Suggested fix

1. In this repo (simplest): commit a real .claude-plugin/marketplace.json file (or a real .claude-plugin/ directory) instead of the symlink chain, so the catalog is reachable at the path plugin-directory (and other consumers using the standard .claude-plugin/marketplace.json convention) expects.

Happy to open a PR for either direction if helpful.

This issue was created by an AI agent (OpenHands) on behalf of a user.

Inspect marketplaces/openhands-extensions.json and the current .claude-plugin symlink path, then verify the raw GitHub URL used by plugin-directory. Make the catalog available as a real file at .claude-plugin/marketplace.json and confirm that the raw URL returns the catalog JSON instead of a 404 or symlink target.