Plugins development

Strapi allows the development of local plugins that work exactly like the external plugins available from the Marketplace.

🤓 Extending plugins

If you would rather extend an existing plugin than create a new one, see the Plugins extension documentation.

Create a plugin

Strapi provides a command line interface (CLI) for creating plugins. To create a plugin:

1. Navigate to the root of a Strapi project.
2. Run yarn strapi generate or npm run strapi generate in a terminal window to start the interactive CLI.
3. Choose "plugin" from the list, press Enter, and give the plugin a name in kebab-case (e.g. my-plugin)
4. Choose either JavaScript or TypeScript for the plugin language.
5. Create a plugins configuration file if one does not already exist: ./config/plugins.js or ./config/plugins.ts for TypeScript projects.
6. Enable the plugin by adding it to the plugins configurations file:

JavaScript

./config/plugins.js

    module.exports = {
      // ...
      'my-plugin': {
        enabled: true,
        resolve: './src/plugins/my-plugin' // path to plugin folder
      },
      // ...
    }

TypeScript

./config/plugins.ts

    export default {
      // ...
      'my-plugin': {
        enabled: true,
        resolve: './src/plugins/my-plugin' // path to plugin folder
      },
      // ...
    }

7. Run npm install or yarn in the newly-created plugin directory.
8. (TypeScript-specific) Run yarn build or npm run build in the plugin directory. This step transpiles the TypeScript files and outputs the JavaScript files to a dist directory that is unique to the plugin.
9. Run yarn build or npm run build at the project root.
10. Run yarn develop or npm run develop at the project root.

Plugins created using the preceding directions are located in the plugins directory of the application (see project structure).

✏️ Note

During plugin development it is helpful to use the --watch-admin flag to toggle hot reloading of the admin panel. See the Admin panel customization documentation for more details. (TypeScript specific) While developing your plugin, you can run yarn develop --watch-admin or npm run develop -- --watch-admin in the plugin directory to watch the changes to the TypeScript server files.

💡 Tip

Check this blog post to learn how to publish your Strapi plugin on npm.

Add features to a plugin

Strapi provides programmatic APIs for plugins to hook into some of Strapi's features.

Plugins can register with the server and/or the admin panel, by looking for entry point files at the root of the package:

• strapi-server.js for the Server (see Server API),
• strapi-admin.js for the admin panel (see Admin Panel API).

🤓 Custom fields plugins

Plugins can also be used to add custom fields to Strapi.