The official project has no plugin store, so someone grabbed the spot on the day it open-sourced: dsh-market's 11k stars

dsh-market is the plugin market inside DeepSeek Harness (dsh). DeepSeek open-sourced dsh in August 13 under the slogan "everything is a plugin", but didn't build an official store. Two hours later, the same author had set up a plugin directory. The next day they published this market plugin. The directory then funneled people to the market, and several desktop clients bundled it into their installers. It collected 11k stars in 84 days and is still adding over two hundred a day. The playbook is worth learning, but dsh's spot is already taken.

Four timestamps from the afternoon of August 13

On August 2026, 13 11:56 (UTC), deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness was created on GitHub. By November the repo had over 270k stars. Its README only asks plugin authors to tag repos with dsh-plugin. There is no official store.

The same day, Ma Tianyi (@fkysly on X, about 15.7k followers) posted: "Claude Code/Codex is like Apple... while DeepSeek Harness may be an Android philosophy... the core is the plugin ecosystem." Baoyu @dotey reposted it.

He then got to work. On 13:55, the awesome-dsh-plugin directory repo was created, just two hours after the official one. On 15:33, dshmarket 0.0.1 appeared on npm. The next day, 04:58, the dsh-market repo was created, and on 10:12 version 1.0.0 was released. (Times come from GitHub and npm records.)

Six days later, someone posted a survey in the official dsh Discussions, "Community plugin market: a week's observation" (Discussion #3395, 8-19). Its opening line: "There is no official plugin market yet, so the community built one." The survey found that within a week, 82 projects were doing this: 32 markets, 31 directories and 9 managers.

What it is

Once installed, dsh's plugin page gets a new "Plugin market" tab. Users can browse and search community plugins and install, upgrade or uninstall them in one click. They can toggle plugins without restarting, switch themes, bookmark items and back up config. If a bad plugin keeps dsh from starting, it offers diagnosis and recovery. For users in China, it routes downloads through a GitHub accelerator.

The plugin list doesn't live in this repo. It comes from the same author's awesome-dsh-plugin. The code is mostly written by the author alone, with 799 commits versus 137 for the next contributor.

Current numbers: 11-06 has 10,983 stars, +7 in the last 1,288 days, +30 in the last 5,743 days, and 413 forks (GitHub, 11-06). On npm, dshmarket had 860k downloads in October. Because it ships updates often and desktop builds pull it on every build, those downloads aren't a user count. They only show how many places it's installed.

82 similar projects: why this one

Two numbers in the survey are worth remembering. First, directories collected 7.7 times the stars of markets. Of the 32 markets, half had under 6 stars. Second, 75% of projects had only one contributor. The post says: "Building is very fast in the AI era, productivity is in surplus. Finding demand and owning mindshare may matter more."

Browsing and one-click install were done by all 32 projects. dsh-market differs in three ways.

One: it sits on the author's own directory. awesome-dsh-plugin's listing rule is simple: each plugin submits one PR that adds one YAML file, so PRs don't conflict. By August 19 it had 1,494 entries, and it later grew to 23k stars, becoming the default list. The Chinese README opens with:

🛒 Recommended install: dsh-market (optional), the plugin market inside DeepSeek Harness. Every plugin in this list is available there.

Every plugin author who wants to be listed reads that line. Many plugin READMEs also say "installable from dsh-market". In return, the market header has a "Submit a plugin" link back to the directory's submission guide. That forms a loop: authors go to the directory to get listed and see the market there; users install the market; authors then send their own users to the market to install plugins.

Two: desktop clients bundled it into their installers. anywhere-labs' dsh-desktop has 35k stars, and its build script prepare-dsh-market.mjs pulls the latest dshmarket from npm on every package build, across stable, beta and preview channels. dataelement's dsh-desktop (17k stars) also ships it. Many people's first contact with the DSH desktop app was through this.

How do those users turn into GitHub stars? A small "dsh-market" link in the upper right of the market header points to the repo. A comment in the source explains why:

Most visitors arrive through the client that embeds it. There's no other way for them to find the repo.

Comments run on GitHub Discussions (giscus), so you need to log in to GitHub to post. Bug reports also go to issues.

Three: it's the least likely to break dsh. dsh startup is all-or-nothing: one bad entry in the plugin list and the whole program won't start. The survey logged 4 cases of "dsh won't start after installing a plugin", caused by invalid YAML, an accidental npm deletion of a core package, a plugin registered without its package downloaded, and the same id registered twice. dsh-market hands installation to the official command, installs only from allowlisted sources, and provides a recovery entry point if startup fails. dsh has since shipped several breaking updates in a row, and it kept up with every release. About 210 versions have been published to npm in total. Clients feel safe bundling it because of that stability.

The author's name on X drove the first day, but there's no data on how many stars that brought. In recent months, growth has mostly come from two steady channels: the catalog funnel and being built into desktop clients.

The official side later added a store, but it didn't get pushed out

In October, dsh 0.2.1 added an official "Discover" page and "index sources," and gave the agent a plugin_market tool, which is effectively the official side building the framework of a store itself.

dsh-market didn't fight the official side. It packaged its entire catalog in an index format the official side recognizes and distributes it via the npm package dsh-plugin-catalog, so the official Discover page also searches its data. It then made itself a tab on the official plugin page, right next to "Installed." The README spells this out: dsh gives each index source only 15 seconds, GitHub Pages times out on some networks, so the index is hosted on npm/jsDelivr.

The 8-19 figures come from Discussion #3395; the rest come from GitHub daily records. I couldn't find the direct cause of why 10-28 jumped the most. Timing-wise it's close to the dsh 0.2.1 rc release, and also close to the update that turned it into a plugin-page tab (inference).

The curve is very flat, +100 to +350 per day, with no sign of paid acquisition or star farming.

Who it's competing with

There are also a batch of SEO catalog sites (dshmarketplace.dev, dsh-plugin.market, deepseek.club, etc.) and direct forks. By Aug 19, there were 10 repos named dsh-plugin-market or dsh-plugin-marketplace alone.

If it were you

C has things to learn, but following it isn't worth much. That spot in dsh is already taken: the author holds the standard catalog, the leading clients have it built in, and the official Discover page uses its data. Building another DSH marketplace now makes you the 33th of the 32 in the census post. The playbook can be used on other platforms, but you need to wait for the next moment when a major platform open-sources and has no official store, and you have to beat the rush within the first two days.

Who it's for Developers who want to earn stars for their open-source project, can keep up with new platform launches, and can ship something usable within a day or two. Ideally they already have some reputation in this circle, or can post in the official discussion board the moment it opens.

Who it's not for People who want to build a plugin marketplace or catalog for dsh now (82 projects have already tested that for you); people unwilling to keep changing code for the host's breaking updates long-term (it has shipped 210 versions, so it's not a build-and-forget product).

How to do it When the next plugin-centric platform open-sources, follow its order:

1. On day one, build the catalog before the marketplace. A catalog gets 7.7 times the stars of a marketplace, and "submit a PR to get listed" turns plugin authors into people who spread it for you.
2. Recommend your own install tool in the catalog, leave a plugin-submission entry in the tool, and have the two funnel traffic to each other.
3. Make the tool a package that a downstream client can integrate with one line, and proactively contact client authors to ask them to build it in.
4. Put a low-key link back to the repo inside the app.
5. When the official side adds a similar feature, format your data so the official side can read it directly rather than fighting it.

If you don't want to wait for the next platform, you can build what the dsh ecosystem hasn't done well. For example, the "know whether it runs before you install" need raised in the census post: AdamPlatin123's review catalog has already shown someone wants this, but it doesn't handle installation.

How to get users Same as it did: post a launch thread in the official discussion board early (its catalog launch thread is #215), put a recommendation at the top of the catalog README, go talk to leading clients about building it in, and add a Chinese homepage targeting the terms people search (its PR #951 did exactly this).

When before? The window to claim the directory was only the first day or two after the platform opened source. dsh-market shipped within 20 hours with 1.0, awesome-dsh-plugin took only 2 hours, and LivXue/dsh-plugin-shop, launched 11 days later, has stopped growing.

Signs you read it wrong ① Once the official Discover page matures, dsh-market's daily star gains drop to a few dozen, which would show that when a major platform adds its own store, the community marketplace's position is shakier than judged here, and this playbook has to be discounted; ② a late DSH review or security-audit project gets several thousand stars within a month, which would show there are still openings in the dsh ecosystem worth moving up a tier for; ③ the next major platform opens source and a catalog created that same day gets tens of thousands of stars, which would show this playbook is repeatable and worth preparing for in advance.