Plugin developer use case - leamas/OpenCPN GitHub Wiki

The plugin developer interacts with opencpn via

• The plugins project at https://github.com/opencpn/plugins
• Tarballs which can be used by the installer
• XML metadata which provides means for opencpn to locate and download the tarball.

The basic workflow for a new plugin is

• Clean-up and update the sources. See Plugin Adaptation
• Modify the plugin sources so it produces a usable tarball
• Upload the tarball so it's available on an url.
• Create a new plugin catalog which contains metadata for the new plugin.
• Make the new catalog the one used in opencpn.
• Test installing the new plugin using opencpn.
• Issue a pull request to https://github.com/opencpn/plugins with the new catalog data
• The new catalog data becomes available to end users when the pull request is merged.

After making these steps the new plugin is a available for end users. For practical reasons, the best is to modify the plugin CI setup so it produces uploaded tarballs and XML metadata as part of regular building.