Distributing via Protégé’s “Check for plugins”

Protégé can discover and install this plugin from File ▸ Check for plugins — no manual jar copying. That menu reads a plugin registry (a .repository URL list) and, for each listed update descriptor (update.properties), offers the plugin when its id (= Bundle-SymbolicName, here io.github.hakjuoh.protege-mcp) is either not yet installed, or installed at a lower version. Both files are published from this GitHub repo, so you can install straight from the official registry with nothing to fill in:

protege-mcp.repository — the registry list, served from the main branch at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hakjuoh/protege-mcp/main/protege-mcp.repository. Because Protégé’s “Plugin registry” is a single URL, this file lists our descriptor and nests Protégé’s default registry, so pointing Protégé here shows protege-mcp alongside the full official catalog (Cellfie, ELK, OntoGraf, OWLViz, …) — you don’t lose the standard plugins.
update.properties — the update descriptor it points at (id / name / version / download / readme / author), served from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hakjuoh/protege-mcp/main/update.properties. Its download URL is the jar attached to the matching GitHub Release. The descriptor is authoritative and may intentionally lag the source version while the next release is being prepared; it is advanced only after the named asset exists.

This registry path only describes how the built bundle reaches Protégé. The live server, Ontology Assistant, and headless CLI are separate runtime surfaces described in DESIGN.md. The same Bundle-SymbolicName / version rules used here are covered under Packaging and dependency isolation.

Install from the official registry (no setup)

Point Protégé at the registry. Settings ▸ Plugins ▸ “Plugin registry” → paste
```
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hakjuoh/protege-mcp/main/protege-mcp.repository
```
(The field defaults to the official Protégé registry; “Reset to default registry location” restores it.)
Discover it. File ▸ Check for plugins → “Protege MCP Server” appears in the list (together with the official plugins, since this registry nests Protégé’s default one).
Install it. Select it and confirm. Protégé downloads the jar named in update.properties (download=…/releases/download/v<version>/protege-mcp-<version>.jar) straight from the GitHub Release and drops it into your plugins directory.
Restart Protégé on a Java 17+ JVM (see Requirements). On reload you get the MCP Server view and the Settings ▸ MCP tab.

How the discovery chain is wired (all on GitHub). The registry URL you paste serves protege-mcp.repository; its single line points Protégé at the raw update.properties on main; that descriptor’s download points at the protege-mcp-<version>.jar asset on the matching GitHub Release. Registry list → update descriptor → release asset — three hops, all hosted by this repo, nothing to host yourself.

If Check for plugins shows an empty list, the registry or download URL was unreachable: an unresolvable URL is logged at info level and silently skipped, not shown as an error. Confirm the registry URL above resolves (open it in a browser) and that the current Release asset named by update.properties exists.

Use your own fork

If you fork the project and want to serve the plugin from your account instead:

Publish the jar. Build (mvn clean package) and upload plugin/target/protege-mcp-<v>.jar somewhere downloadable — e.g. attach it to a GitHub Release on your fork.
Repoint the URLs. In update.properties, set download= (and readme=) to your fork’s URLs; in protege-mcp.repository, change the raw URL so it resolves to your fork’s update.properties. Commit and push both so their raw URLs are reachable, e.g. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/<you>/protege-mcp/main/protege-mcp.repository. Point readme= at a raw, self-contained simple HTML file (like the official plugins’ readme.html — here docs/readme.html), e.g. raw.githubusercontent.com/<you>/protege-mcp/main/docs/readme.html. Protégé ignores the server Content-Type (raw GitHub serves text/plain) and instead sniffs the body for <html>, rendering it as HTML in a Swing JEditorPane (HTML 3.2) when found, else as plain text — so a raw .html file renders formatted. Never use a github.com/…/blob/… page: that returns the GitHub web-app HTML, which renders as garbage and whose fetch freezes the dialog. license= is opened in the external browser, so a /blob/ URL is fine there.
Point Protégé at your registry (step 1 above) and run Check for plugins.

Quick local test (no hosting)

Serve the repo over loopback HTTP and point a temporary jar URL at your build output:

# from the repo root, after `mvn clean package`:
python3 -m http.server 8000        # serves ./protege-mcp.repository, ./update.properties, ./plugin/target/...

Temporarily set download=http://127.0.0.1:8000/plugin/target/protege-mcp-<v>.jar in update.properties, then set the Plugin-registry preference to http://127.0.0.1:8000/protege-mcp.repository and run Check for plugins.

The registry URL you put in Settings must be http(s) — Check for plugins does an HttpURLConnection HEAD on it first, so a file:// registry root fails there with an uncaught ClassCastException (the action only catches IOException, so it errors out rather than showing the normal “could not connect” dialog). The download= URL inside the descriptor may be file://.

Version rules (so it actually shows up)

version is compared as an OSGi version. OSGi orders an empty qualifier before a non-empty one, so 0.1.0 < 0.1.0.SNAPSHOT. Consequences:

Installing into a Protégé that doesn’t have the plugin yet → it appears regardless of version.
Updating over an already-installed build → version must be strictly greater than the installed bundle version. Over a 0.1.0.SNAPSHOT dev build, use e.g. 0.1.1, not 0.1.0; to ship an update over the released 0.1.0, bump update.properties version and the bundle version together (e.g. 0.1.1) and attach the new jar to a matching Release.

Or get it into the official list

To appear in everyone’s Protégé (the default registry), open a PR adding your update.properties URL to update-info/5.0.0/plugins.repository in protegeproject/autoupdate — same descriptor format as above.