Documentation/dev-plugins.txt

Gerrit Code Review - Plugin Development
=======================================

A plugin in gerrit is tightly coupled code that runs in the same
JVM as gerrit. It has full access to all gerrit internals. Plugins
are coupled to a specific major.minor gerrit version.

Requirements
------------

To start development, download the sample maven project, which downloads the
following dependencies:

* gerrit-sdk.jar file that matches the war file to develop against


Manifest
--------

Plugins need to include the following data in the jar manifest file:

 Gerrit-Module = pkg.class

Optionally include:

 Gerrit-ReloadMode = 'reload' (default) or 'restart'

If the plugin holds an exclusive resource that must be released before loading
the plugin again, ReloadMode must be set to 'restart'. Otherwise 'reload' is
sufficient.

SSH Commands
------------

Plugins may provide commands that can be accessed through the SSH interface.
These commands register themselves as a part of link:cmd-index.html[SSH Commands].

Each of the plugin commands needs to extend SshCommand.

Any plugin which implements at least one ssh command needs to also provide a
class which extends the PluginCommandModule in order to register the ssh
command(s) in its configure method which must be overriden.

Registering is done by calling:

 command(String commandName).to(ClassName<? extends SshCommand> klass)

Documentation
-------------

Place files into Documentation/ or static/ and package them into the plugin jar
to access them in a browser via <canonicalWebURL>/plugins/<pluginName>/...

Deployment
----------

Deploy plugins into <review_site>/plugins/. The file name in that directory will
be the plugin name on the server.

GERRIT
------
Part of link:index.html[Gerrit Code Review]