Creating a Plugin

#Create a Plugin

The plugin:create command will create a starting point for you to start building out your own plugin. When you run this command you'll need to specify the name of your plugin, so if you wanted to create a plugin called hello, you would run the following command:

php artisan plugin:create hello

You will get a prompt that asks you to enter the description of your plugin:

Provide a short description for your plugin:
 > A simple hello world plugin example

After adding a simple description, your new plugin will be created at resources/plugins/hello

#Plugin Contents

When you create a new plugin you'll have a folder structure that looks something like this:

• HelloPlugin.php
• version.json
• plugin.jpg
• routes/web.php
• resources/views/home.blade.php
• resources/views/livewire/hello.blade.php
• src/Components/Hello.php

This is just a starting point for your plugin, you can restructure the plugin to contain as many or as few files as you would like. The important file to pay attention to is the HelloPlugin.php, this is the entry point for your plugin. You can learn more about that by visiting the Plugin page.

#Deleting Plugins

To delete a plugin, you can simple delete the folder from the resources/plugins folder. You will also want to make sure that the plug-in is not active; otherwise, you will need to remove it from the resources/plugins/installed.json file.

#Renaming Plugins

If you would like to rename a plug-in, you'll need to change the folder name and the corresponding Plugin.php, as an example, say that we renamed the hello plugin and we wanted to change it to goodbye, we would rename the hello folder to goodbye and the HelloPlugin.php to GoodbyePlugin.php. You will also change the name of the class inside that file, and you may need to change references in the Plugin.php to correspond with the new name of the new plugin.

Next, you'll need to change the public $name inside of the GoodbyePlugin.php. You may also want to change the $description in that file as well:

resources/plugins/goodbye/GoodbyePlugin.php

<?php

...

class GoodbyePlugin extends Plugin
{
    protected $name = 'Goodbye';

    protected $description = 'This is where you would change the description';

...

#Sharing Plugins

You can feel free to share or re-use plugins inside of any application. We currently do not have a place where other users can find community generated plug-ins, but if the demand is there, we'll definitely consider adding a place for it.

To learn more about plugins, visit the Plugin Feature page.