Creating a starbuild plugin

To start creating a starbuild plugin, you NEED to know lua as plugins are written in lua. Then create a new lua file in your project folder. Now we need to symlink this file into starbuilds plugin folder. Use the command below to do that

mkdir -p $STARBUILD/plugins
ln -s LUA_FILE $STARBUILD/plugins

Make sure to replace LUA_FILE with the full file name of the lua file you created. After that completes you have your plugin’s lua file installed. Now lets write a plugin. To start paste the example code into your plugin file from below

local plugin = {}
plugin.Name = "My Cool Plugin"
plugin.BaseName = "MyCoolPlugin"
plugin.api = {}
plugin.Triggers = {}
return plugin

Now lets go over what this code does. First we create a plugin table and add a Name field to it. We set this field to the full name of our plugin, then we add a BaseName field, this is the name of the plugin we will be using from our starbuild.lua file, this file should have no spaces, no special chars, and should be small. Then we gain access to the starbuild plugin API by setting the api field to a empty table. Then we create a empty Triggers field, and finally return the plugin table.

Triggers

Triggers are like command we can run in our starbuild.lua file. To create paste the following code above the return statment at the end of the file.

plugin.Triggers.MyTriggerName = function (args)
    print("Plugin triggered!")
end

Now lets go over what this code does. We add a new field to the triggers field named MyTriggerName this is the name of the trigger. We set this field to a function which takes on arg called args. Args is a table which the user will pass in to our trigger.

Testing our plugin

To test our plugin create a new starbuild project, and import our plugin into our project using the following code. NOTE make sure to put this in the Config function

starbuild.LoadPlugin("my_plugin_file")

Take not, we are not using our BaseName we are using the name of the file, without the .lua extension. Now lets trigger our trigger with

starbuild.RunPluginTrigger("PluginBaseName", "Triggername", { args = "Args" })

Just replace PluginBaseName with the basename of the plugin defined in our plugin file, and replace Triggername with the name of our trigger. Now run starbuild run in our project folder, now we should get "Plugin triggered! print to our terminal. For more info on making plugins, browse through the docs, or open a issue.