Making a Plugin

Plugin Creation

Create a new Strapi project or use an existing one

Npm

npx create-strapi-app@latest my-project --quickstart

Yarn

yarn create strapi-app my-project --quickstart

Then set up your project with the default admin user.

Once set up you will generate the default plugin schema using

yarn strapi generate plugin

After you enter your plugin name it will create the schema for your plugin and provides you. You will then have to create the ./config/plugins.js file and add the provided code

module.exports = {
  // ...
  'test-plugin': {
    enabled: true,
    resolve: './src/plugins/test-plugin'
  },
  // ...
}

Note: this plugin will live within the Strapi project however if this is a plugin you plan to use outside the project I would recommend that you move your plugin file outside your strapi project and change resolve to the absolute directory of your plugin then you can maintain it outside this "dummy" Strapi project

Plugin Setup

Once you have generated your plugin you can start the server in 2 different ways

What you need to understand is Strapi itself is headless, the admin panel is completely separate from the server.

Firstly you can run:

yarn develop

This will ONLY auto reload when changes are made to the server and if you are only doing development in the ./server directory of your plugin this will be faster

If you are doing development on BOTH the ./server and ./admin directories you will want to run

yarn develop --watch-admin

This will host the admin panel and server separately. The server will be on localhost:1337 as always however the admin panel will now have hot reloading but this will only be accessible on localhost:8080/admin What is important to note is that the core server is still going to be hosted on localhost:1337 meaning if you need to make requests it will be on localhost:1337 :8000 is ONLY for the admin panel hot reloading.