I administrate a Mattermost Team Edition instance and have separated data that should persist between server upgrades to a directory structure outside the Mattermost installation directory. Paths that I can not reconfigure to their external location are created as symbolic links. Currently this applies to ./config/config.json and ./logs (I could have done the same with ./data I believe, but since this path is configurable I decided to tell Mattermost explicitly about the external location.)

With this I am protected from accidentally deleting data I want to keep during upgrades. Also this makes upgrading somewhat easier than the documented procedure. This has served me well for a while.

With version 5.15 I got interested in the file-list plugin. This would be the first plugin I actually use. Naturally I tried to extend my strategy and extracted the plugin in my external structure and created a symbolic link ./plugins/mattermost-file-list pointing to the extracted directory. But this did not work. I only saw the plugin in the system console when it was there as a true subdirectory of ./plugins.

I would therefore propose that symbolic links in ./plugins are followed in the search for plugin directories under ./plugins. Thanks for considering this.