nodejs-develop-plugins.md

About Flow's TypeScript/JavaScript plugins

Plugins written in TypeScript/JavaScript use the JSON-RPC protocol to communicate with Flow via JSON structured calls.

Although not a hard requirement, this guide will use Node.js to run the TypeScript/JavaScript. We will refer to TypeScript/JavaScript plugin as Node.js plugin from here on.

When building a Node.js plugin, there are several things to be mindful of:

• The most important thing is we do not expect users to have to manually install the dependencies via npm because we aim to provide a seamless experience for them. This can be achieved by adding the following three things to your project:

  1. Add a GitHub workflow — use a GitHub workflow that will install all your plugin's dependencies including the modules inside a folder called node_modules.
  2. Publish all as a zip — zip up your project including a lib directory that contains the modules and publish it to GitHub Releases page.
  3. Point your module path to the node_modules directory — reference all the modules to that directory.

• Users can use their system-installed Node.js with Flow Launcher, but in most circumstances, they will most likely be using Flow Launcher's download of Node.js. This download of portable Node.js version is isolated from the user's system and can be simply removed.

Simple Example

Have a look at this simple example plugin here, notice it has a folder called .github/workflows and a file called Publish Release.yml. This is the workflow file that GitHub Workflow uses to run the CI/CD for the project. Moving out of that folder, you can go into the main.js file; this is the entry file for your plugin.