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Plugin Base Guide

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Plugin Base Guide

Overview

Plugins in Shopware are essentially an extension of Symfony bundles. Such bundles and plugins can provide their own resources like assets, controllers, services or tests, which you'll learn in the next guides.
A plugin is the main way to extend your Shopware 6 instance programmatically.

This section guides you through the basics of creating a plugin from scratch, which can then be installed on your Shopware 6 instance. Refer to the Guide section to know how to Install Shopware 6.

Prerequisites

All you need for this guide is a running Shopware 6 instance and full access to both the files, as well as the command line.
Of course you'll have to understand PHP, but that's a prerequisite for Shopware as a whole and will not be taught as part of this documentation.

Create your first plugin

Let's get started with creating your plugin by finding a proper name for it.

Name your plugin

First, you need to find a name for your plugin. We're talking about a technical name here, so it needs to describe your plugins functionality as short as possible, written in UpperCamelCase. To prevent issues with duplicated plugin names, you should add a shorthand prefix for your company.
Shopware uses "Swag" as a prefix for that case.
For this example guide we'll use the plugin name SwagBasicExample.

INFO

Using a prefix for your plugin name is not just a convention we'd recommend, but a hard requirement if you want to publish your plugin in the Shopware Community Store.

Create the plugin

Now that you've found your name, it's time to actually create your plugin.

Shopware provides a handy command that you can use to generate the plugin structure. Go to your shopware project's root directory and run the following command:

bash
bin/console plugin:create SwagBasicExample

You can pass an addition flag -c or --create-config in the above command which would also create a demo configuration file in the Resources directory. The command will generate all the basic required files that are needed for an extension to be installed on a Shopware instance. Make sure to adjust the namespace in the files as per your need.

If you want to create the structure manually please follow the instructions below:

For this, please navigate to the directory custom/plugins, that you should find in your Shopware 6 installation. Inside the plugins directory, create a new directory named after your plugin, so it should look like this: custom/plugins/SwagBasicExample

By convention, you'll have another directory in there, which is called src. This is not required, but recommended. And that's it for the directory structure for now.

Inside your src directory, create a PHP class named after your plugin, SwagBasicExample.php.
This new class SwagBasicExample has to extend from Shopware's abstract Plugin class, which is Shopware\Core\Framework\Plugin.

Apart from this, only the namespace is missing. You can freely define it, but we'd recommend using a combination of your manufacturer prefix and the technical name, so in this guide this would be: Swag\BasicExample

php
// <plugin root>/src/SwagBasicExample.php
<?php declare(strict_types=1);

namespace Swag\BasicExample;

use Shopware\Core\Framework\Plugin;

class SwagBasicExample extends Plugin
{
}

Basically that's it for the PHP part, your basic plugin class is already done.

INFO

Refer to this video on Creating a plugin that shows how to bootstrap a plugin. Also available on our free online training "Shopware 6 Backend Development".

The composer.json file

You've created the necessary plugin structure and the plugin base class. The only thing missing for your plugin to be fully functional, is a composer.json file inside your plugin's root directory.
custom/plugins/SwagBasicExample/composer.json

This file consists of basic information, that Shopware needs to know about your plugin, such as:

  • The technical name
  • The description
  • The author
  • The used license
  • The current plugin version
  • The required dependencies
  • ... and a few more

This file can also be read by Composer, but that's not part of this guide.
Further information you'll have to add in there: The type has to be shopware-platform-plugin, so Shopware can safely recognize your plugin as such and the require field must include at least shopware/core, to check for compatibility.

Here's an example composer.json for this guide, which will do the trick:

js
// <plugin root>/composer.json
{
    "name": "swag/basic-example",
    "description": "Description for the plugin SwagBasicExample",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "type": "shopware-platform-plugin",
    "license": "MIT",
    "authors": [
        {
            "name": "Shopware"
        }
    ],
    "require": {
        "shopware/core": "6.5.*"
    },
    "extra": {
        "shopware-plugin-class": "Swag\\BasicExample\\SwagBasicExample",
        "label": {
            "de-DE": "Der angezeigte lesbare Name für das Plugin",
            "en-GB": "The displayed readable name for the plugin"
        },
        "description": {
            "de-DE": "Beschreibung in der Administration für das Plugin",
            "en-GB": "Description in the Administration for this plugin"
        }
    },
    "autoload": {
        "psr-4": {
            "Swag\\BasicExample\\": "src/"
        }
    }
}

There's another two things that you need to know:

  1. The shopware-plugin-class information. This has to point to the plugin's base PHP class. The one, that you've previously created.
  2. The whole autoload part. This has to mention your PSR-4 namespace. So if you'd like to have another namespace for your plugin, this is the place to go.

WARNING

The path you've configured in the configuration autoload.psr-4, src/ in this case, will be referred to as <plugin root>/src in almost all code examples. If you're using a custom path here, e.g. just a slash /, then the examples would be <plugin root>/ here instead.

And that's it. The basic structure and all necessary files for your plugin to be installable are done.

INFO

Refer to this video on The composer.json plugin file that explains the basic structure of the composer.json plugin file. Also available on our free online training "Shopware 6 Backend Development".

Install your plugin

You can safely install your plugin now and Shopware should easily recognize it like this.

Open up your command line terminal and navigate to your Shopware 6 directory, the one which also contains the custom directory.

Once inside there, you need to refresh the list of plugins, that Shopware knows yet. This is done with the following command:

bash
php bin/console plugin:refresh

There might be a warning appearing regarding the version of the composer.json file, but you can safely ignore that.
You should end up with a list like the following:

bash
Shopware Plugin Service
=======================

 ------------------------------ -------------------------------------------- ----------- ----------------- ---------------------------- ----------- -------- -------------
  Plugin                         Label                                        Version     Upgrade version   Author                       Installed   Active   Upgradeable
 ------------------------------ -------------------------------------------- ----------- ----------------- ---------------------------- ----------- -------- -------------
  SwagBasicExample               The displayed readable name for the plugin   1.0.0                         Shopware                     No          No       No
 ------------------------------ -------------------------------------------- ----------- ----------------- ---------------------------- ----------- -------- -------------

This output is a good sign, because this means Shopware recognized your plugin successfully. But it's not installed yet, so let's do that.

bash
php bin/console plugin:install --activate SwagBasicExample

This should print the following output:

bash
Shopware Plugin Lifecycle Service
=================================

 Install 1 plugin(s):
 * The displayed readable name for the plugin (v1.0.0)

 Plugin "SwagBasicExample" has been installed and activated successfully.

And that's basically it.
You've just successfully created your Shopware 6 plugin!

Next steps

There's many more things to discover when creating your first plugin. Hence, here's a list of important articles, that may be of interest for you.