OpenCPN Developer Manual

The plugin developer interacts with opencpn via . The plugins project at https://github.com/opencpn/plugins . Tarballs which can be used by the installer . XML metadata which provides means for opencpn to locate and download the tarball.

The basic workflow for a new plugin is

  1. Clean-up and update the sources. See [Plugin Adaptation](Plugin-adaptation)

  2. Modify the plugin sources so it produces a usable tarball

  3. Upload the tarball so it’s available on an url.

  4. Create a new plugin catalog which contains metadata for the new plugin.

  5. Make the new catalog the one used in opencpn.

  6. Test installing the new plugin using opencpn.

  7. Issue a pull request to https://github.com/opencpn/plugins with the new catalog data

  8. The new catalog data becomes available to end users when the pull request is merged.

After making these steps the new plugin is a available for end users. For practical reasons, the best is to modify the plugin CI setup so it produces uploaded tarballs and XML metadata as part of regular building.