Creating a Plugin

You can use the following command to create a plugin project in the working directory:

xpb plugin init <plugin_name>

This command will create a Go module using plugin_name as the module name.

The key file to note is plugin.go. It will look something like this:

package plugin

import (
	"github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/core"
	"github.com/pocketbuilds/xpb"
)

type Plugin struct {}

func init() {
	xpb.Register(&Plugin{})
}

// Name implements xpb.Plugin.
func (p *Plugin) Name() string {
	return "plugin"
}

// This variable will automatically be set at build time by xpb
var version string

// Version implements xpb.Plugin.
func (p *Plugin) Version() string {
	return version
}

// Description implements xpb.Plugin.
func (p *Plugin) Description() string {
	panic("unimplemented")
}

// Init implements xpb.Plugin.
func (p *Plugin) Init(app core.App) error {
	panic("unimplemented")
}

The struct here called Plugin adheres to the xpb.Plugin interface, which allows it to be registered to the xpb runtime in the init() function (a special Go function that runs when your Go module is first loaded).

The xpb.Plugin interface looks like this:

type Plugin interface {
	Init(app core.App) error
	Name() string
	Version() string
	Description() string
}

• Init(app core.App) error is called before the pocketbase application runs. Here you should register pocketbase app hooks to make your plugin do whatever you want it to do.

• Name() string should return your plugin's unique name. Plugin names should follow a snake case naming convention, i.e. "my_plugin".

• Version() string should return your plugin's current version number. You will notice that in the example it returns a package-level variable called version. At build time, xpb automatically sets this variable for you using the version in the build project's go.mod file, so you should not need to generally worry about this.

• Description() string should return a short description of what your plugin is and what it does. This is used in the set of pocketbase xpb commands for listing currently installed plugins.