Project-local plugins (./.hermes/plugins/)
The gateway does not load project-local plugins. Every Hermes session ( hermes , hermes --tui , the Desktop app, messaging and cron) runs in the one gateway, which discovers plugins once for the whole process and never from the folder you started a session in. Setting HERMES_ENABLE_PROJECT_PLUGINS=true therefore has no effect on sessions: when a CLI or TUI session on the gateway's machine starts with it set in a folder whose ./.hermes/plugins/ has plugins, Hermes shows a warning at the start of that session and writes the same line to gateway.log . To use a plugin, install it as a user plugin ( ~/.hermes/plugins/ or hermes plugins install ) and enable it with hermes plugins enable <name> .
From the official Hermes Agent documentation.