Developing Discourse Plugins - Part 1 - Create a basic plugin

[pacharanero (Marcus Baw)]

@pacharanero

I’m experiencing the same issue with getting symlinks to work (I’m on Linux) - the ln -s appears to work, but from inside the docker container the path is inaccessible. The plugin works when it is directly copied into the plugins folder, but I like the symlink workflow as it enables a more sensible Git arrangment.

Here’s what I’ve had to do in order to preserve a similar workflow to using symlinks (softlinks):

I edited /bin/docker/boot_dev in Discourse (outside the container) so that the plugin I want to work on is added as a volume and mounted in the /src/plugins/ directory (inside the container).

In my case it looks like this:

docker run -d -p 9405:9405 -p 1080:1080 -p 3000:3000 -p 9292:9292 \
-v "$DATA_DIR:/shared/postgres_data:delegated" \
-v "$SOURCE_DIR:/src:delegated" \ 
-v "/home/marcus/code/discourse/discourse-reflective-learning-plugin:/src/plugins/discourse-reflective-learning-plugin" \
$ENV_ARGS --hostname=discourse --name=discourse_dev --restart=always \
discourse/discourse_dev:release /sbin/boot

I’ve used absolute paths because I couldn’t be bothered to get into relative paths inside Docker and $SOURCE_DIR environment variables, but I’m sure there’s a cleverer way to do this, so that perhaps all your plugins could be in directories at the same level as discourse and it would automagically include them all. Hope this helps someone.