Legacy Plugins > Publishing plugins

    Publishing plugins

    If you've created a new plugin, we strongly encourage you to share it with the community as an npm package, so that it will become available in our Plugins Explorer:

    In order to properly release a plugin, you need to make sure to fill the package.json with these information:

    {
    "name": "datocms-plugin-foobar",
    "version": "0.0.1",
    "homepage": "https://github.com/mark/foobar#readme",
    "description": "Add a small description for the plugin here",
    "keywords": ["datocms-plugin"],
    "datoCmsPlugin": {
    "title": "Plugin title",
    "previewImage": "docs/preview.gif",
    "entryPoint": "dist/index.html",
    "fieldTypes": ["json"],
    "pluginType": "sidebar",
    "parameters": {
    "global": [ ... ],
    "instance": [ ... ]
    }
    },
    "devDependencies": { ... },
    "dependencies": { ... }
    }

    The following table describes the properties that can be set on the file:

    • name (required): Npm package name

    • version (required): Plugin version

    • description (required): Short description of what the plugin does

    • keywords (required): Plugin keywords, useful to help users find your plugin

    • homepage: URL of the plugin homepage, will be shown in the Plugin Explorer

    • datoCmsPlugin.title (required): Plugin title

    • `datoCmsPlugin.previewImage: Relative path to a plugin preview image (better if it's a GIF)

    • datoCmsPlugin.coverImage: Relative path to a cover image that will be used in the Marketplace

    • datoCmsPlugin.entryPoint (required): Relative path to the plugin entry point

    • datoCmsPlugin.pluginType (required): The type of plugin

    • datoCmsPlugin.fieldTypes (required): The types of field the plugin can be used with

    • datoCmsPlugin.parameters (required): Configuration parameters for the plugin

    Make sure to follow these rules:

    • name MUST be prefixed with datocms-plugin;

    • datoCmsPlugin.entryPoint, datoCmsPlugin.previewImage and datoCmsPlugin.coverImage must be files contained in the package, and need to be defined as relative paths to the package root;

    • keywords MUST contain the datocms-plugin keyword, otherwise the plugin won't be visible in the Plugin explorer;

    • datoCmsPlugin.fieldTypes MUST contain one or more of the following values: boolean, date, date_time, float, integer, string, text, lat_lon, json, seo, link, links, video, color;

    • datoCmsPlugin.pluginType MUST be one of the following values: field_editor, field_addon or sidebar;

    • datoCmsPlugin.parameters MUST follow the syntax detailed in the Configuration parameters section of this guide.

    Requiring external JS/CSS inside of your entrypoint

    We'll use unpkg.com to serve the entrypoint as an iframe, so ie. if your plugin is called datocms-plugin-foobar and the entry point specified in the package.json is dist/index.html, the URL that will be loaded will be something like this:

    https://unpkg.com/datocms-plugin-foobar/dist/index.html

    This means that if the page you requires a JS file with an absolute path like /js/bundle.js then it won't work, as the final URL will be https://unpkg.com/js/bundle.js, which will be non-existent. Make sure that any external resource you require is expressed as a relative path to the HTML page!