After many frustrating attempts, found out that apparently ln -s does not work in a Windows environment, or atleast not how it should.
ln -s essentially just copy-pasted the plugin folder into the discourse/plugins folder
Apparently, in Windows the way to create symbolic links is to use the mklink command in command prompt (run as administrator, and this command does not natively run in Windows PowerShell either).
Using the mklink command (with both arguments /d and /h), although the created symbolic link could be seen present in the directory, the plugin was not working with discourse (and also not showing in /admin/plugins).
I tried this multiple times with restarting the rails server, deleting the tmp folder, but to no avail.
I assume you are using Vagrant on windows? If you can’t get the symbolic links sent over, I think the only way you can do it is to copy the plugin into discourse/plugins manually and work from there. It should work as long as you are not making changes to the core discourse app at the same time, which confuses git.
When your plugin is ready, you’ll want to copy it to another directory to package it up for git.
@AhmadF.Cheema I had similar problems with the symlinking using Vagrant 1.9.8 on Linux, and a completely standard Discourse Vagrant development environment as per the docs.
The problem is simple when you look into it. From the scope of inside the Vagrant VM, the destination of the symlink is not a valid path. Try executing the command ls -al in the plugins directory inside your VM (in a standard install this is at /vagrant/plugins)
vagrant@discourse:/vagrant/plugins$ ls -al
total 36
drwxr-xr-x 1 vagrant vagrant 4096 Oct 22 09:08 ./
drwxr-xr-x 1 vagrant vagrant 4096 Oct 22 09:10 ../
drwxr-xr-x 1 vagrant vagrant 4096 Sep 7 19:51 discourse-details/
drwxrwxr-x 1 vagrant vagrant 4096 Oct 21 13:56 discourse-narrative-bot/
drwxr-xr-x 1 vagrant vagrant 4096 Oct 21 13:56 discourse-nginx-performance-report/
drwxr-xr-x 1 vagrant vagrant 4096 Sep 7 19:51 discourse-plugin-outlet-locations/
drwxrwxr-x 1 vagrant vagrant 4096 Oct 21 13:56 discourse-presence/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 vagrant vagrant 55 Oct 22 09:08 my-basic-plugin -> /home/marcus/code/discourse/my-basic-plugin
drwxr-xr-x 1 vagrant vagrant 4096 Oct 21 13:56 lazyYT/
drwxr-xr-x 1 vagrant vagrant 4096 Oct 21 13:56 poll/
As you can see, the path /home/marcus/code/discourse/my-basic-plugin cannot possibly be accessible from the VM because it doesn’t exist inside the VM!
The solution is to delete the externally created symlink and set up a separate shared folder in Vagrant, by adding a line to your Vagrantfile:
Then restart the Vagrant VM: vagrant halt && vagrant up so that this change is picked up
Now, when you enter your VM via SSH using vagrant ssh you can create a symlink inside the VM:
cd /vagrant/plugins
ln -s /my-basic-plugin .
Now you can develop in a neatly isolated local folder, and have the neat Git workflow that @eviltrout describes, and the symlinking happens inside the VM. Note that outside the VM, the symlink will be broken - but this shouldn’t matter for our purposes.
Windows symlinks are different from Unix symlinks, thus your confusion. Windows synlinks are very fussy, requiring particular versions of OS to support and sometimes applications must be written to be aware of this. In other words, the stars must line up perfectly for windows symlinks to work.
A hard link (/H) I dont think work with directories. Your /D makes a symlink on a directory, trumping your /H (which is used to create a hard link to a file, not a directory).
Confusing? Welcome to Windows.
There are four types of links in Windows:
MKLINK (no flags) – symbolic link to file
MKLINK /H – hard link to file
MKLINK /D – symbolic link to directory
MKLINK /J – junction (i.e. hard link) to directory
What you need is is a junction which is Windows-speak for hard link to a directory.
Do MKLINK /J to your plugins directory and the system will treat it as a subdirectory. In fact it won’t know otherwise. Beware, it is not common to have a Windows directory (folder in Windows-speak) to point to the same place as another directory, so you’ll get confused very easy and forget that both are the same things.
That’s why you’ll need to run the command in Administrator mode, otherwise Windows won’t let you create the directory junction.
Yup, you’re right. If you can avoid it, avoid messing with Windows. Windows is very picky and may choose to die or go wrong at the most unfortunate moment…
