Just wanted to share an error I have experienced and the solution, as I couldn't find anything similar online. I am using v7.5.2.

I was getting an error on application startup on the dev environment (on Azure) that was preventing access to the frontend and backoffice of the site:

DirectoryNotFoundException: Could not find part of the path 'C:\MyApp\App_Plugins\MyCustomPlugin

The plugin has a single html view that called a back office api controller decorated with the PluginController attribute.

I resolved the error by adding an empty package.manifest file to the root of the plugin folder in App_Plugins.

What is confusing is that the plugin worked fine on my local machine and I was unable to recreate the error. The plugin had worked fine on the dev environment also until recently. No code or files had been edited with the plugin since it was working. If anyone has an explanation for this behaviour I would love to hear it!