Create and publish a plugin

A GitBook plugin is a node package published on NPM that follow a defined convention.

Structure

package.json

The package.json is a manifest format for describing Node.js modules. GitBook plugins are built on top of Node modules. It declares dependencies, version, ownership, and other information required to run a plugin in GitBook. This document describes the schema in detail.

A plugin manifest package.json can also contain details about the required configuration. The configuration schema is defined in the gitbook field of the package.json (This field follow the JSON-Schema guidelines):

{
    "name": "gitbook-plugin-mytest",
    "version": "0.0.1",
    "description": "This is my first GitBook plugin",
    "engines": {
        "gitbook": ">1.x.x"
    },
    "gitbook": {
        "properties": {
            "myConfigKey": {
                "type": "string",
                "default": "it's the default value",
                "description": "It defines my awesome config!"
            }
        }
    }
}

You can learn more about package.json from the NPM documentation.

The package name must begin with gitbook-plugin- and the package engines should contains gitbook.

index.js

The index.js is main entry point of your plugin runtime:

module.exports = {
    // Map of hooks
    hooks: {},

    // Map of new blocks
    blocks: {},

    // Map of new filters
    filters: {}
};

Publish your plugin

GitBook plugins can be published on NPM.

To publish a new plugin, you need to create an account on npmjs.com then publish it from the command line:

$ npm publish

Private plugins

Private plugins can be hosted on GitHub and included using git urls:

{
    "plugins": [
        "myplugin@git+https://github.com/MyCompany/mygitbookplugin.git#1.0.0"
    ]
}