Install From The Marketplace

Installing runs against your own instance: the catalog resolves which version you are entitled to, and your local API does the work of putting it into your workspace. Because the work happens locally and in stages, an install streams its progress step by step rather than returning a single result at the end.

Before You Start

The Marketplace is a separate service with its own account, so log in to it once:

dots marketplace login

The browser device flow stores a session for later commands. Purchases and entitlements belong to that account, not to your workspace credential.

1. Find Something

dots marketplace search "onboarding"

Narrow it when the catalog is broad. --type filters to a listing type and --subtype to a superpower subtype; --free shows only free listings, and --max-price takes an amount in cents and selects the price band it falls into:

dots marketplace search "onboarding" --type dotabase_template --free
dots marketplace search "code review" --subtype agent --max-price 2500

2. Read The Trust Summary Before You Commit

dots marketplace info agency-onboarding

The detail prints the listing's type, its current version, the seller, the price, and its trust summary — the seller's tier and how many of its claims carry evidence. A listing with zero evidenced claims says zero; the surface does not fill the gap with a score. Marketplace explains what each part of that summary is asserting.

3. Install It

dots marketplace install agency-onboarding

Some listings need values from you — a client name, a project prefix. Supply them ahead of the prompt with --var, which repeats. This is what makes an install scriptable when you are running it across several workspaces:

dots marketplace install agency-onboarding --var CLIENT_NAME="Northwind Traders" --var REGION=eu

The install streams six ordered steps, and a failure names the step it stopped at:

• entitlement — confirms you own it, before anything is transferred.
• download — retrieves the version's payload.
• checksum — re-verifies the payload against the digest published with it. A mismatch stops here; nothing is written.
• variables — resolves the values the payload declared, from --var or by asking.
• register — writes the result into your workspace.
• done.

Installing a bundle interleaves per-member progress inside those steps, so a bundle where one member fails reports exactly which one and leaves the successful members in place. The failure report offers a retry of just the failed members rather than the whole install.

An SDK plugin is the one type with an extra requirement: because it carries code that runs in a sandbox, your company needs the execution.run capability before the install will proceed. Build and Publish a Plugin covers that grant.

4. See What You Own

dots marketplace purchases

This prints your purchases and the entitlements they granted — the account's record, independent of which workspace you happened to install into.

5. Keep Installs Current

Update a single listing by slug, or every listing with an update available:

dots marketplace update agency-onboarding
dots marketplace update --all

An update skips the entitlement step, since you already own the thing being updated, and runs the remaining steps exactly as an install does. Give it a slug or --all, never both and never neither — either mistake is a usage error before any request is made. When nothing has an update available, the command says so rather than reporting a silent success.

If Something Goes Wrong

A checksum failure means the bytes did not match what the seller published, and the install stops before writing. Nothing to clean up.

A refund is the one thing that takes an entitlement away. Below the automatic limit a refund settles immediately; at or above it, it enters a queue an operator dispositions. Either way the entitlement is revoked when the refund completes, and a listing that is later suspended or removed from the catalog does not affect what you already own.

The Same Catalog Inside The App

Everything here has an in-app equivalent: the Marketplace section of the app browses the same catalog, shows the same three-part trust surface, and runs the same install steps with the same per-member progress. The CLI is the scriptable form, which is what you use when the same install has to run once per client. Marketplace Overview covers the catalog and its trust model end to end.