Inside your DocPad website directory, create a directory called plugins
(i.e. yourwebsite/plugins
)
Inside your new plugins directory, create the directory for your plugin (i.e. yourwebsite/plugins/yourpluginname
)
Inside your new plugin directory, run the following commands to clone out the example plugin that we will use as our base:
git initgit remote add base https://github.com/docpad/docpad-plugin-yourpluginname.gitgit pull base masternpm run our:setup # installs dependencies, and prepares the docpad dependency for developmentnpm run our:commpile # compile your plugin
You will now find several files.
An important thing to note about the package.json
file is that our plugin starts with the version 2.0.0
. This is because v2 plugins are compatible for with DocPad v6, whereas v1 plugins are compatible with DocPad v5. This is currently a necessary convention that you must follow.
The source/index.coffee
file is the logic for our plugin. It's current contents will uppercase all documents with .uc
or .uppercase
extension. The simplest form of this file (which wouldn't perform anything) would be:
source/index.coffee# Export Pluginmodule.exports = (BasePlugin) -># Define Pluginclass YourpluginnamePlugin extends BasePlugin# Plugin namename: 'yourpluginname'
A more verbose form of this would be:
source/index.coffee# Export a function that will accept the BasePlugin class from DocPad and then will return our own class that will extend it.module.exports = (BasePlugin) -># Create and return our own class that extends the BasePlugin classclass YourpluginnamePlugin extends BasePluginource name: 'yourpluginname'# The rest of your plugin definition goes here# ...
Extending the BasePlugin class is important as it provides some of the tucked away magic for our plugins, such as automatically listening for events when a plugin method of the event name is defined. You can discover the plugin events available to you on the Events Page.
If you prefer to write your plugins with ES6 JavaScript, you can do it like so:
source/index.js// Export Pluginmodule.exports = function (BasePlugin) {// Define Pluginreturn class YourpluginnamePlugin extends ({// Plugin nameget name () { return 'yourpluginname' }// Initial plugin configurationget initialConfig () { return {} }});};
If you prefer to write your plugins with ES5 JavaScript, you can use the BasePlugin.extend({})
method like so:
source/index.js// Export Pluginmodule.exports = function (BasePlugin) {// Define Pluginreturn BasePlugin.extend({// Plugin namename: 'yourpluginname'});};
Renderers are used to convert one particular type of text format, to another type, or rather something to something else.
DocPad will perform these conversions from one format to another by triggering the render
event. A plugin can hook into this event by adding the render
function inside it.
An important thing to note about the rendering process is that DocPad knows when and how to call the render event based on the documents extensions. For instance, the document document.html.md.eco
will have two render events fire. The first render event will contain the inExtension
as eco
, and the outExtension
as md
. The second render event will contain the inExtension
as md
, and the outExtension
as html
. This is why generally in our plugins we want to check the values of inExtension
and outExtension
to make sure our plugin is performing the correct render.
Plugins of other types are generated in the same way as Renderers, they simply aim to achieve different results. While Renderers primarily use the render
event to trigger their behaviour other plugin types use a variety of events such as writeBefore
and parseAfter
to alter the creation of documents and add additional functionality. Click here for more information on event types
Probably the first thing you want to do is to change the name and description of your plugin. There are several spots you would want to do this:
The filenames in src
The classname and plugin name in src/yourpluginname.plugin.coffee
Various properties inside package.json
The heading and description inside README.md
Once you update your package.json
file with the new values, you would want to run npm run our:release:prepare
which will also compile your plugin's meta files with projectz, which is very useful for automatically updating your README.md
and LICENSE.md
files with the latest details for your package.json
file.
For testing our plugins, we will take note of the following files:
source/test.coffeetester.coffeetest/out-expected/...src/render/...package.json (optional)
source/test.*
This file is optional, but is useful for running tests against multiple configurations. For example, the paged plugin's customisations allows it to test its compatibility with other DocPad plugins. If you require such functionality, you can get started with something like this:
# Test our plugin using DocPad's Testersrequire('docpad-plugintester').test({testerClass: 'RendererTester', pluginPath: __dirname+'/..'})
source/tester.*
This file is optional but is essential if you want to tell DocPad to load additional plugins as well as yours, or if you need to do advanced configuration of the test environment. The file exports a class that will be used to test your plugin. For now there's just the one tester type to extend from, RendererTester
which by default runs your plugin against a folder of documents and compares the output to the contents of the out-expected
folder. This is all you'll need for most plugins as we're only really concerned about the input and output of our plugins.
test/package.json
This file is optional but is essential if you want your test site require other plugins than just your one.
The Text Plugin is a great example of this, you can find its test site's package.json file here.
DocPad's RendererTester
will setup an instance of DocPad using the configuration specified in your tester above, it will then generate a site using the documents in the test/source/render
folder and compare the results with the files in the test/out-expected
folder. This way you can quickly and easily test how documents in a site are handled by your plugin.
To run the full test suite, including compilation and meta updates, you would run:
npm run our:release:prepare
Which will output something like:
> [email protected] test /Users/balupton/Projects/docpad-extras/plugins/yourpluginname> node ./out/yourpluginname.test.jsyourpluginnameyourpluginname ➞ createyourpluginname ➞ create ✔yourpluginname ➞ load plugin yourpluginnameyourpluginname ➞ load plugin yourpluginname ✔yourpluginname ➞ generateyourpluginname ➞ generate ➞ actionyourpluginname ➞ generate ➞ action ✔yourpluginname ➞ generate ➞ resultsyourpluginname ➞ generate ➞ results ✔yourpluginname ➞ generate ✔yourpluginname ➞ serveryourpluginname ➞ server ✔yourpluginname ➞ finish upyourpluginname ➞ finish up ✔yourpluginname ✔6/6 tests ran successfully, everything passedOK
Writing good unit tests is hard, but just try to cover all the possible inputs and expected outputs for your plugin and you will be making a good start.
If you are working on a development copy of DocPad, you can use it instead by running the following inside the DocPad instance directory:
npm run our:release:preparenpm link
Then inside your plugin, run:
npm link docpadnpm run our:release:prepare
If your plugin becomes popular with the DocPad community, you will have the option of making it an official plugin. This means:
Transferring it to the DocPad GitHub Organisation so that it can be maintained by the DocPad Extras Team
Running npm owner add bevryme
in your plugin directory to give the DocPad Core Team publishing rights
The Core Team can then give publish rights to whomever from the Extra Team wants to take accountability for the plugin
The Extras Team can then alert the maintainers of the plugin of things that need doing (preferably via a pull request) so the maintainers can just merge and publish