OpenCPN Developer Manual

Plugin Guidelines

Publishing rules

These are the guidelines for publishing OpenCPN Plugins in the plugin catalog or on OpenCPN.org

Plugins must be distributed under the license terms of GPL V2 or later.

  1. In particular, this means that the Plugin author must arrange for independent publication of the source code of the Plugin. OpenCPN.org will not host the Plugin source code.

  2. Plugins published on OpenCPN.org must be ported and available for one of the following list of platforms:

    • Debian style Linux

    • Flatpak Linux

    • Microsoft Windows

    • Macintosh OS-X

  3. Developers should keep in mind that the usability and popularity of a Plugin is directly related to its platform portability, and so should strive to make their Plugins available for all OpenCPN platforms.

  4. Plugin binaries may exist on the OpenCPN.org server or elsewhere

New plugins are published using the Plugin Installer available since 5.2.0. This means that plugins are published after pull request to the plugins project as described in the catalog documenation.

Documentation

Plugins should properly documented as described in the documentation page.

Internationalization (i18n)

There is an i18n infrastrucure based on the gettext tools and the https://crowdin.com/ web-based translator service. Plugin in need of i18n should use this infrastructure as described in the i18n page.

Dependencies

Plugins should bundle all dependencies. This has two consequences:

  • Plugins should bundle libraries which exist in opencpn, like the nmea0183 library. The plugins must not break if the library in opencpn is updated.

  • Plugins should not depend on operating systems libraries beyond those linked to the main binary since users will not have these installed. See the dependencies page.