Plugins

Plugins allow a developer to create an independent page in Arches that is accessible from the main navigation menu. For example, you may need a customized way of visualizing your resource data. A plugin would enable you to design such an interface. Plugins, like widgets and card components rely only on front-end code. Ajax queries, generally calls to the API, must be used to access any server side data.

Registering your Plugin

To register your Plugin, you’ll need a JSON configuration file looking a lot like this sample:

{
    "pluginid": "b122ede7-24a6-4fc5-a3cc-f95bfa28b1cf",
    "name": "Sample Plugin",
    "icon": "fa fa-share-alt",
    "component": "views/components/plugins/sample-plugin",
    "componentname": "sample-plugin",
    "config": {},
    "slug": "sample-plugin",
    "sortorder": 0
}

pluginid:

Optional A UUID4 for your Plugin. Feel free to generate one in advance if that fits your workflow; if not, Arches will generate one for you and print it to STDOUT when you register the Plugin.

name:

Required The name of your new Plugin, visible when a user hovers over the main navigation menu

icon:

Required The icon visible in the main navigation menu.

component:

Required The path to the component view you have developed. Example: views/components/plugins/sample-plugin

componentname:

Required Set this to the last part of component above.

config:

Required You can provide user-defined default configuration here. Make it a JSON dictionary of keys and values. An empty dictionary is acceptable.

slug:

Required The string that will be used in the url to access your plugin

sortorder:

Required The order in which your plugin will be listed if there are multiple plugins

Plugin Commands

To register your Plugin, use this command:

python manage.py plugin register --source /Documents/projects/mynewproject/mynewproject/plugins/sample-plugin.json

The command will confirm your Plugin has been registered, and you can also see it with:

python manage.py plugin list

If you make an update to your Plugin, you can load the changes to Arches with:

python manage.py plugin update --source /Documents/projects/mynewproject/mynewproject/plugins/sample-plugin.json