Plugins.md

Plugins

Installing plugins

By default, manuel creates a plugins directory in ~/.manuel.d/plugins. You can use the load_plugin function inside a manuelfile to load a plugin from that directory by name. Example:

load_plugin timeutils  # contains the datestamp function

function what_time_is_it {
  now=$(datestamp)
  echo "It's $now"
}

The load_plugin timeutils line in the above example searches in the plugins directory for a file called timeutils.manuel and loads it into the manuel context if found.

A .manuel.d/plugins directory might look like this:

$HOME/.manuel.d
│
└── plugins
    │
    ├── one_plugin
    │   ├── .git
    │   ├── one_plugin.manuel
    │   └── README.md
    │
    ├── another_plugin
    │   ├── .git
    │   ├── another_plugin.manuel
    │   └── README.md
    │
    └── my_fav_plugin.manuel

If you would prefer to keep your plugins in another location, just set the MANUEL_DIR shell variable to an absolute path to the place where you would like to have manuel store it's plugins and other data. Example:

$ MANUEL_DIR=/some/path manuel run_tests
>> Initialising plugin directory in /some/path/plugins
...

Writing plugins

A plugin should be written as a file containing bash functions. The file should be named with the .manuel extension, so that the plugin loader can find it. For example, we might want to write a plugin to provide handy time-related functions, called timeutil.manuel :

#! /usr/bin/env bash

# timeutils.manuel

function datestamp {
  echo $(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)
}

A good way of distributing manuel plugins would be to put the plugin file in a git repository which the user can clone into their manuel plugins directory:

$ cd $HOME/.manuel.d/plugins
$ git clone [email protected]:<author>/<plugin>.git