embark/site/source/docs/creating_plugins.md

title: Creating Plugins layout: docs

If you can't find a plugin that fulfills your needs, it's probably a good time to think about creating your own. In this guide we'll discuss how to set up a custom plugin and briefly talk about various use cases. Later on we'll dive into the available Plugin APIs.

Creating a plugin project

A plugin is really just another NodeJS project that takes a plugin API object and make use of it. To get started, all we have to do is creating a new directory and initializing it as an npm module:

$ mkdir yourpluginname
$ cd yourpluginname
$ npm init

Once that is done we can create an index.js file that contains the following code:

module.exports = function(embark) {
  // plugin logic goes here
}

The embark object provides plenty of APIs to extend different functionalities of Embark, which can be found in the Plugin Api Reference.

Usecase examples

Since the Plugin API surface is rather big, here are some usecase examples to sparkle some inspiration:

• Adding a Smart Contract file to the list of source files to be watched so they can be used by other Smart Contracts with addContractFile()
• Adding a Smart Contract configuration using registerContractConfiguration() (goes well with addContractFile())
• Adding a hook that's called before a Smart Contract's binary will be deployed using beforeDeploy()
• Configure a custom provider for web3 initialization with registerClientWeb3Provider()
• Create your own custom Smart Contract wrapper logic using registerContractsGeneration()
• Adding a new command to Embark's interactive console using registerConsoleCommand()
• Adding support for other compilers such as Viper, LLL, etc. using embark.registerCompiler()
• Executing certain actions when Smart Contracts are deployed with embark.events.on()
• Registering a service in Embark - registerServiceCheck()