Testing & Publishing Plugins

Testing plugins

Regular (CLI) plugins

First, make sure you have picgo installed globally:

yarn global add picgo

# or

npm install picgo -g

Then run picgo -h to confirm the installation works. (This is required: on the first run PicGo initializes by creating the default config file and generating package.json, etc.)

Next, place your plugin folder under the directory where PicGo’s default config file lives. The plugin folder name must start with picgo-plugin-, otherwise PicGo won’t load it.

Then, in the same directory as the default config file, run:

npm install ./picgo-plugin-<your-plugin-name>

This installs your plugin into PicGo’s config directory so PicGo can load it at runtime. After that, iterate on your plugin and run PicGo commands to test.

GUI plugins

If you want to develop a GUI plugin, first download and install PicGo. On first launch, the app will initialize its configuration.

If you’re using PicGo 2.3.0+, you can use the plugin import feature and select your plugin directory directly:

Otherwise:

The PicGo (Electron) config file path differs by OS:

• Windows: %APPDATA%\picgo\data.json
• Linux: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/picgo/data.json or ~/.config/picgo/data.json
• macOS: ~/Library/Application\ Support/picgo/data.json

For example, on Windows you can find it at:

C:\Users\<your-username>\AppData\Roaming\picgo\data.json.

On Linux you can find it at:

~/.config/picgo/data.json.

Same idea on macOS.

Assume your plugin directory is /usr/home/picgo-plugin-<your-plugin-name>.

In the directory where PicGo’s config lives, run:

npm install /usr/home/picgo-plugin-<your-plugin-name>

This installs your plugin into PicGo’s config directory so PicGo can load it.

Note

Any change to a GUI plugin requires restarting PicGo to take effect. “Restart” does not mean closing and reopening the main window—you must fully quit the PicGo process and then launch it again.

This is because PicGo loads plugins via Node.js require(), which caches modules at runtime. Since PicGo 2.0.2, you can use the tray icon menu or the mini window’s “Restart App” button to restart quickly.

Publishing plugins

To make your plugin usable by others, publish it to npm following the naming convention picgo-plugin-<name>. Once you follow the convention, your plugin can:

• Be discovered by other users.
• Be installed via picgo install <name> or picgo add <name>.

For example, if you publish picgo-plugin-wow, users can install it via picgo install wow.

You can find official PicGo plugins on PicGo’s GitHub org page.

GUI plugins

If your plugin is not optimized for the GUI (for example, it doesn’t implement guiMenu), PicGo (Electron) will show a prompt like this during installation:

Plugins that are not optimized for the GUI will show a CLI badge in the top-right:

If you want your plugin to display an icon and description inside the PicGo app, follow these requirements:

• Put a logo.png at the npm package root, otherwise PicGo will show the default logo.
• Add description and homepage fields to package.json.
• Add "picgo-gui-plugin" to package.json.keywords to indicate your plugin is optimized for the PicGo GUI.

Example:

{
  "description": "This is a picgo plugin",
  "homepage": "https://github.com/XXX/XXX#readme",
  "keywords": [
    "picgo-gui-plugin"
  ]
}

• If your plugin provides an Uploader or a Transformer, you should declare them in the plugin entry file so PicGo can locate them:

Example:

const register = () => {
  ctx.helper.uploader.register('temp', {
    handle (ctx) {
      // ...
    },
    config (ctx) {
      // ...
    }
  })

  ctx.helper.transformer.register('temp', {
    handle (ctx) {
      // ...
    },
    config (ctx) {
      // ...
    }
  })
}

module.exports = {
  return {
    register,
    uploader: 'temp', // <- declare your uploader name
    transformer: 'temp' // <- declare your transformer name
  }
}

Submitting to Awesome-PicGo

To help more people discover your plugin, you can submit a PR to Awesome-PicGo after publishing and add your project to the awesome list.

Before submitting, make sure you comply with the requirements in CONTRIBUTING.