Bespin Embedded Guide
Installing Plugins
Plugin Formats
When you download a plugin, you're likely to get one of three kinds of files:
- .js
- .zip
- .tar.gz (or .tgz)
Bespin can directly work with the .js files. The other two formats are
archive formats that contain multiple files and directories. You will need
to expand those archives into your plugin directory (see "Where To Put
The Files" below).
Where To Put The Files
In the building section of this guide, we described the
manifest file. The manifest file allows you to set a search_path option
that dryice will use when building Bespin.
We recommend a directory structure that is something like this:
- your_project (top level directory with everything you need)
- bespin (the original Bespin Embedded files provided by the Bespin project)
- plugins (your custom-created plugins)
- thirdparty (plugins that you've downloaded from elsewhere)
With this kind of directory structure, you can upgrade Bespin at will just by
deleting the bespin directory and putting a new one in its place. In your
manifest file, you'll add both plugins and thirdparty to your search_path.
So, when you download a plugin, you'll either drop the .js file into the
thirdparty directory, or you'll expand the .zip or .tar.gz file into
the thirdparty directory. Expanding the .zip or .tar.gz file should create
a new directory that has a file called package.json in it. The name of the
plugin is the name of the directory.
A complete example:
- your_project
- bespin
- plugins
- mygroovyplugin.js
- thirdparty
- markdown.js
- toolbar
- package.json
- index.js
- resources
- icon1.png
- icon2.png
In this example, we have downloaded two plugins created by other people:
markdown and toolbar. The markdown plugin is contained in a single .js
file that we've placed in the thirdparty directory. The toolbar plugin
may have started out as a .zip file, and we've expanded it out to create
a directory called toolbar with a package.json file in it.