flipper/docs/tutorial/js-setup.md

id, title, sidebar_label

id	title	sidebar_label
js-setup	Building a Desktop Plugin	Building a Desktop Plugin

Now that we have the native side covered, let's display the data we're sending on the desktop side. You can check out the full workflow of building Flipper desktop plugins here: https://fbflipper.com/docs/extending/js-setup.html.

Dynamic Plugin loading

By default, Flipper will start with the plugins it was bundled with. You can configure it to also look for plugins in custom directories. To do that, modify the ~/.flipper/config.json file that is created the first time you start Flipper and add a newly created directory the pluginPaths attribute.

Your file will then look something like this:

{
  "pluginPaths": [
    "~/Flipper/custom-plugins/"
  ],
  ...
}

Creating the Plugin Package

With the loading part out of the way, we can create the new plugin. For that, first create a new folder inside the custom plugins directory. Then use yarn init (npm init if that's more your style) to initialise a new JavaScript package:

$ cd ~/Flipper/custom-plugins/
$ mkdir sea-mammals
$ cd sea-mammals
$ yarn init

Open the package.json and edit it. There are a few important things:

1. "name" must start with "flipper-plugin-"
2. "keywords" must contain "flipper-plugin"
3. "id" must be the same as used on native side, e.g. returned by getId() method in Android plugin. In our case that is "sea-mammals".
4. "specVersion" must contain the version of the specification according to which the plugin is defined. Currently, Flipper supports plugins defined by the specification version 2, while version 1 is being deprecated.
5. "title" and "icon" are optional fields specifying the plugin item appearance in the Flipper sidebar.

For instance:

{
  "name": "flipper-plugin-sea-mammals",
  "id": "sea-mammals",
  "specVersion": 2,
  "version": "2.0.0",
  "main": "dist/bundle.js",
  "flipperBundlerEntry": "src/index.tsx",
  "license": "MIT",
  "keywords": ["flipper-plugin"],
  "icon": "apps",
  "title": "Sea Mammals",
  "category": "Example Plugin",
  "scripts": {
    "prepack": "flipper-pkg bundle"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "flipper": "latest"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "flipper-pkg": "latest"
  }
}

See package.json

Now that our package has been set up, we are ready to build a UI for our plugin. Either by using a standardized table-based plugin, or by creating a custom UI.