Extension Development

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Before you start writing code for your Evershop module, we recommend reading EverShop’s module overview documentation to understand the basic of EverShop module.

This document will guide you through the process of enabling the extension feature of EverShop. After that, you will be able to create your own extension and install it to your EverShop project.

Let's assume that you have already installed EverShop and you have a running project. If you haven't installed EverShop yet, please check this document for the installation guide.

Let's start!

The extensions Folder

In the root folder of your EverShop project, you will find a folder named extensions. If it doesn't exist, you can create it manually. This folder contains all of the extensions that you have installed to your project. You can create your own extension and install it to this folder.

You can check this document to learn more about the project folder structure.

The NPM Workspace

An extension can be a NPM package. It means that you can have a packages.json file in your extension with some dependency. To do that, you need to create a NPM workspace. A NPM workspace is a NPM package that contains multiple NPM packages. You can read more about NPM workspace here.

To enable the NPM workspace feature, you need to add the following lines to your package.json file in your EverShop project:

package.json

{
  "workspaces": [
    "extensions/*"
  ]
}

After that, when you run npm install command, it will install all of the dependencies of your extensions.

Naming Convention

We only accept characters [a-z] and _ for the extension name. The extension name must be unique. It means that you can't have two extensions with the same name.

Example

• FreeShipping
• Vendor_FreeShipping

The Extension Folder Structure

Just like a module, below is the folder structure of an extension:

extensions
└── Vendor_ExtensionName
    ├── api
    │   ├── site
    │   └── admin
    │       └── postCreate
    │           ├── route
    │           ├── validatePostMiddleware.js
    │           └── [validatePostMiddleware]savePostMiddleware.js
    ├── controllers
    │   ├── admin
    │   │   └── postCreate
    │   │       ├── route
    │   │       └── loadPostMiddleware.js
    │   └── site
    │       └── postView
    │           ├── route
    │           ├── loadPostMiddleware.js
    │           └── [loadPostMiddleware]loadVariantMiddleware.js
    ├── graphql
    │   └── types
    ├── migration
    │   └── Version_1.0.0.js
    ├── pages
    │   ├── admin
    │   │   └── postCreate
    │   │       ├── route
    │   │       ├── GeneralComponent.js
    │   │       └── FormComponent.js
    │   └── site
    │       └── postView
    │           ├── route
    │           ├── TitleComponent.js
    │           ├── PriceComponent.js
    │           └── VariantsComponent.js
    ├── bootstrap.js
    └── packages.json

You can check this document to learn more about the module folder structure.

Active/Deactive Your Extension

Let's assume that you have created an extension named myExtension. To enable it, you need to add the following lines to your config file in your EverShop project:

./config/production.config.json

{
  ...
  "system": {
        "database": {
            "host": "localhost",
            "port": 3306,
            "database": "evershop",
            "user": "root",
            "password": ""
        },
        "extensions": [
            {
                "name": "myExtension",
                "resolve": "extensions/myExtension",
                "enabled": true
            }
        ]
    }
}

To disable it, you need to change the enabled property to false.

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Enabling or disabling an extension requires building your project again.

Publish your extension as a NPM package

By default, extension is located in the extensions folder of your EverShop project. However, you can publish your extension as a NPM package and install it to your EverShop project just like any other NPM package.

npm install @evershop/productcomment

and then hook it up to your EverShop project:

./config/production.config.json

{
  ...
  "system": {
        "database": {
            "host": "localhost",
            "port": 3306,
            "database": "evershop",
            "user": "root",
            "password": ""
        },
        "extensions": [
            {
                "name": "productcomment",
                "resolve": "node_modules/@evershop/productcomment",
                "enabled": true
            }
        ]
    }
}

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Check out the create your first extension document to learn how to create your first extension.