The plugin manger uses Plugin repositories to gather knowledge on the available plugins. The repositories can be provided in three formats:
As a JSON file. Which contains the metadata of one or several plugins. The file need to follow the JSON format for plugin data (see bellow).
As a local directory. The directory is automatically scanned to find any Groimp plugin. They are found from their plugin.xml file. The plugin data is then extracted from that file.
As a list of repositories (.list). The .list file is a simple list of any of the three repository formats.