Plugin Development Workflow

[devmattrick]

Hi there,

I'm new to NodeBB and I've been looking I to developing plugins. I've read the documentation and get the gist of how everything works and I have my plugin set up using symbolic links so I can modify and update it in the node_modules folder as I make changes. My main question is if there is some sort of hot plugin reloading feature available which can reflect changes made in the plugin without having to reload the entire NodeBB instance. It seems tedious to have to restart NodeBB every time you make a change to your plugin.

Thanks for your time.

[julian]

Hey there @devmattrick ! Always glad to see new people writing plugins.

Look into using grunt to automate the restart and build process when writing plugins.

[jarey]

@devmattrick i think you can use grunt to benefit from file refreshing and to avoid restarting nodebb on plugin development.

https://github.com/NodeBB-Community/nodebb-grunt/blob/master/README.md

Haven't tried it myself and probably another devs can tell you if there's another option or an updated one.

Regards.

[julian]

@jarey Ha! inb4

[devmattrick]

@julian @jarey that looks extremely useful, I'll be sure to check it out. Thank you very much!

[Tomas Pavlacky]

@jarey it doesn't work because dependencies are out of date .

[jarey]

@Tomas-Pavlacky seems that we will have to submit a PR to update those dependencies. Did you managed to make it work?