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What you'll learn
  • how to add plugins to various parts of Webiny
  • how to best organize your plugins

If you’re not yet familiar with the concept of plugins in Webiny, please refer to the Plugins key topic article.

Overview
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Throughout our docs, and especially in the how-to guides, we often show which plugins you need to use to achieve certain goals, but we skip the step-by-step instructions on how to enable those plugins. That is to prevent redundant content being copied in every article. In those guides, you’ll simply see an instruction like “Add this plugin to your Admin Area application”.

This article explains how to add plugins to:

React Applications
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Both Admin Area and Website React applications follow the same folder structure, and so, the process of registering new plugins into both applications is the same.

The plugins entry files for these applications can be found at the following locations:

To register a new plugin, you need to navigate to the appropriate plugins entry file, and add your plugin to the end of the array that is being registered into the PluginsContainer.

Organize your plugins

We always recommend creating a dedicated file, or even a folder, to hold your custom plugins.

apps/{admin|website}/src/plugins/myPlugins.ts

Now that we have a file containing our plugins, we can import it and register in the React application:

apps/{admin|website}/src/plugins/index.ts

With this, your new plugin(s) will be registered into the application.

If you already have your React app running locally, the new import will be picked up automatically, and your plugin should be registered as soon as the browser reloads.

If your application is deployed to the cloud, you’ll need to redeploy it to apply your new plugin(s).

GraphQL APIs
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All GraphQL API Lambda function handlers present in the default Webiny project follow the same structure, and so, the process of registering new plugins is the same for all of them.

We’ll cover the two main GraphQL API Lambda function handlers: Main GraphQL API and Headless CMS GraphQL API. Their entry files can be found at the following locations:

To register a new plugin, you need to add it to the end of the plugins array that is being passed to the createHandler factory function.

apps/api/{graphql|headlessCMS}/src/plugins/myPlugins.ts

Now that we have a file containing our plugins, we can import it and register in the corresponding Lambda function entry file:

apps/api/{graphql|headlessCMS}/src/index.ts

If you already have the watch running, the new import will be picked up, built, and deployed to the cloud automatically.

If not, you’ll need to deploy your API manually, to apply the new plugin(s).

IMPORTANT!

Even though this process looks very similar to how we register plugins into React applications, there’s a big difference between the two. React applications have one single global PluginsContainer, while API applications create a new one to handle each individual invocation (HTTP request).

To learn more, please read the Plugins key topic article.

Webiny CLI
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To register a new plugin into the Webiny CLI, navigate to webiny.project.ts file, located in the root of your Webiny project, and add your new plugin to the plugins array.

As usual, we recommend creating a dedicated file/folder for your custom plugins, to keep things nicely organized.

cliPlugins.ts

Now add your new plugin to the Webiny CLI:

webiny.project.ts

Next time you run the Webiny CLI, your new plugin will be applied.