Developing Discourse Plugins - Part 4 - Setup git

Discourse
Tue, 21 Jul 2015 20:54:59 +0000
Developer Guides

Previous tutorial: Developing Discourse Plugins - Part 3 - Add custom site settings

Now that your plugin is getting more sophisticated, it’s time to get more sophisticated about how you develop it.

We suggest that you use git as version control for your plugin. We also recommend that you use github to share your plugin code with others.

Creating your Git Repo

Once you’ve created your Github account, visit this url to create a new repository. You can call it anything you want, but generally something that starts with discourse- is good. Make sure the repository is public. Here’s how my screen looked:

Creating your local working folder

At this point I create a local directory on my computer to hold the plugin. I usually put mine in ~/code but you can put it anywhere you like on your computer:

mkdir -p ~/code/discourse-plugin-test
cd ~/code/discourse-plugin-test

Now let’s follow the instructions from github to initialize the repo with a README:

echo "# discourse-plugin-test" >> README.md
git init
git add README.md
git commit -m "first commit"
git remote add origin git@github.com:eviltrout/discourse-plugin-test.git
git push -u origin main

Finally, create a plugin.rb file for your plugin as explained in part 1. For this example I just created a dummy one:

plugin.rb

# name: discourse-plugin-test
# about: Shows how to set up Git
# version: 0.0.1
# authors: Robin Ward

Creating a symlink

Because you followed our developer guide you should have a copy of discourse checked out on your computer somewhere. I checked mine out to ~/code/discourse but again you could have put it anywhere and this should still work if you adjust the following code accordingly:

cd ~/code/discourse/plugins
ln -s ~/code/discourse-plugin-test .

The above code created a symbolic link between your discourse code and your plugin folder. Restart your development server and you should find your plugin is working!

The beauty of this setup is you can just check your plugin into github and not worry about the discourse codebase it lives inside. Your changes will be isolated to the plugin itself. If you need to edit discourse’s code you still can, but git will track the changes separately!

I recommend using one editor window for your plugin codebase and one for Discourse itself. It is easier when you think of them as two different things.

More in the series

Part 1: Plugin Basics
Part 2: Plugin Outlets
Part 3: Site Settings
Part 4: This topic
Part 5: Admin interfaces
Part 6: Acceptance tests
Part 7: Publish your plugin

This document is version controlled - suggest changes on github.

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