If you searched for "Karve plugin," there isn't one. Karve is a native Windows application for
working with .http and .rest files, and it does not install inside Rider, Visual Studio, or
VS Code.
That is deliberate. Karve gives your API requests a dedicated workspace while the files stay exactly where they are: in your repos, in Git, and still runnable by whatever editor you already have open.
Why a standalone app instead of a plugin
One workspace across repositories. Every IDE extension hits the same ceiling. It sees the
project window it lives in and nothing else, so if your requests are spread across five services,
no editor shows you all of them at once, and the working login request is always in the repo you
didn't open. Karve gathers .http files from anywhere on disk into virtual folders without moving
them. The file stays in its repo and still shows up in one tree.
More on organizing requests across repos →
History that outlives the session. Every send is saved, request and full response body, and it is still there tomorrow. When something worked last Tuesday and returns a 500 today, you can search for it, open it back into a tab, and compare the two by eye.
Environments that aren't scoped to a project. Karve reads plain .env files. One is active
globally and feeds {{var}} resolution; a file-level @var still overrides it when you want a
local exception. Moving from staging to production is a dropdown, not a find-and-replace.
Environment variables in .http files →
Responses you can read. JSON tree, raw body, headers, and the exact request that went out with every variable already substituted. That last one ends a good share of "why is this a 401."
No IDE to wait for. Loading a solution to send one GET is a bad trade. Karve opens in under two
seconds and indexes nothing. How to run a .http file on Windows →
Your files keep working everywhere else.
@baseUrl = https://api.example.com
### Fetch the current user
GET {{baseUrl}}/me
Authorization: Bearer {{token}}
That is the same file the VS Code REST Client, the JetBrains HTTP Client, and Visual Studio 2022 already run. Karve doesn't convert it, wrap it, or drop a proprietary sidecar next to it. It opens the file, runs it, and leaves it as text your teammates review in a pull request. Installing Karve takes nothing away from the plugin you use today.
The closest thing to an integration
If "plugin" meant "something that talks to my other tools," there is one. Karve ships an opt-in MCP
server. Turn it on in Settings and an AI agent (Claude Code, or anything else that speaks MCP) can
find and run requests in the live app. It never sees resolved variable values. The agent reads
{{token}}; Karve substitutes the real one at send time.
How Karve's MCP server works →
Karve is also REST-only, single-user, and Windows-only. No GraphQL, no gRPC, no shared team workspace. If you need those, the plugin in your IDE may be the better fit, and that is a fine answer.
Or did you mean Carve?
Looking for the unrelated Carve markup plugin for JetBrains, the one for .crv files?
View it on JetBrains Marketplace.