How to develop add-ons

How to develop add-ons#

VLT has a recommended set of add-ons to provide additional functionality and features. These add-ons are included in the Cookieplone-based development setup used for VLT development. They are checked out using mrs.developer and declared as pnpm workspaces to allow for easy development and testing.

This setup allows to develop VLT along with all the set of recommended add-ons in a single development environment. mrs.developer.json declares the version of each add-on in a tag or branch field, allowing to easily switch between different versions of the add-ons when needed. By default, a specific tag is used for each add-on, this version has to be aligned with the ones declared in the recommendedAddons.json file of VLT. This serves as documentation and a reference for the versions of the add-ons that are known to work well together with VLT. CI is configured to use the same versions of the add-ons as declared in recommendedAddons.json, ensuring consistency between development and CI environments. If they are not aligned, tests might fail due to version mismatches.

Developing an add-on#

To develop an add-on for VLT, follow these steps:

  1. Create a new branch of the add-on repository you want to develop.

  2. Update the mrs.developer.json file in the VLT repository to point to your new branch for the add-on you are developing.

  3. In the VLT development environment, run make install to install the add-on.

  4. Develop the add-on as needed, making sure to test it within the VLT development environment.

  5. Once development is complete, create a pull request in the add-on repository to merge your changes back into the main branch.

  6. Release the add-on following its release process.

  7. After the pull request is merged, update the recommendedAddons.json file in the VLT repository to point to the new version of the add-on.

  8. Update the mrs.developer.json file in the VLT repository to point back to the main branch or the new tag of the add-on.

  9. Run make install again in the VLT development environment to ensure the latest version of the add-on is installed.

Note

CI won't pass until the add-on changes are merged and released, and the recommendedAddons.json and mrs.developer.json files are updated accordingly.

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