The Developer Toolbox is an official Discourse theme component designed to streamline development by providing quick access to common links, actions, and settings. It’s triggered via the ` key or an optional header button (configurable via theme settings), and includes features like toggling alerts and plugin outlets, accessing themes, plugins, settings, and documentation. It’s intended for local development only, not production use.
Users have praised its utility: manuel suggested hiding the header button from non-admins — a feature now implemented by keegan. Lilly reported a broken link for “Discourse Docs,” which keegan fixed. denvergeeks noted that “Toggle Outlets” requires the separate plugin-outlets-theme-component to function [6]. Alteras and Arkshine collaborated to fix the Plugin API link, merged by keegan, who also added support for custom links via theme settings [9].
th21 inquired about Crowdin translations; Lilly confirmed it’s now available. Regarding “Toggle Alerts,” keegan clarified it hides site-wide alerts — useful for theming — though it may appear to do nothing if no alerts are present. Support, bugs, UX, and feature requests can be filed via Meta with the developer-toolbox tag.
The component is designed by default to be unobtrusive, so you trigger a modal by tapping the grave slash ` character on your keyboard. Alternatively, you can enable a trigger button in the UI by toggling a theme setting.
Once the modal appears you have access to some common actions, links and settings that you might typically need while developing with Discourse.
Settings
Name
Description
show header button
Show the trigger for the dev toolbox in the header panel
remove button from flow
Fixes the header button to bottom right. (Requires show_header_button to be enabled)
actions close modal
Triggering an action in the toolbox will also close the toolbox modal.
Right now the header icon always shows. A small improvement could be to only show it to admins. So when browsing the site as a regular user the look is not tweaked.
I’ve also added a few updates (fixes/modernizations) as well as a new feature where you can now add custom links by defining them in the theme setting:
For local development use only. Not useful for production sites
