Skip to main content

Developing Strapi plugins

👀 Info

This section is about developing Strapi plugins to use them as local plugins or to submit them to the Marketplace. Not what you're looking for? Read the plugins introduction and find your use case and recommended section to read from there.

Strapi allows the development of plugins that work exactly like the built-in plugins or 3rd-party plugins available from the Marketplace. Once created, your plugin can be:

  • used as a local plugin, working only with a specific Strapi project,
  • or submitted to the Marketplace to be shared with the community.

The first step to developing a Strapi plugin is to create it using the CLI-based generator. Then you'll be able to leverage the plugin APIs to add features to your plugin.

Plugin creation​

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:
./config/plugins.js

    module.exports = {
      // ...
      'my-plugin': {
        enabled: true,
        resolve: './src/plugins/my-plugin' // path to plugin folder
      },
      // ...
    }
  1. Run npm install or yarn in the newly-created plugin directory.
  2. (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.
  3. Run yarn build or npm run build at the project root.
  4. 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.

Plugin APIs​

Strapi provides the following programmatic APIs for plugins to hook into some of Strapi's features:

🤓 Custom fields plugins

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