XIV Docs

Creating your own Dalamud repository

Note

This is for creating a 3rd party repository, which is probably not what you want. Almost all plugins should be submitted to the main repository, see https://dalamud.dev/plugin-development/plugin-submission.

Creating a 3rd party Dalamud repository is easy, since it’s pretty stateless and only requires you to host the files somewhere. People even host them on free servers like GitHub.

Plugin Manifests #

First you need to craft a folder somewhere (preferably with version control like Git) and start putting plugin manifests inside. These manifest.toml contain vital information like where we check the plugin source code from and more. In your manifest folder, create a stable subfolder. And then create more folders as needed inside, which correspond to the plugin name.

<manifest dir> /
  PluginA /
    manifest.toml
  PluginB /
    manifest.toml

The manifest.toml is in this format:

[plugin]
repository = "<git repository>"
commit = "<git hash>"
owners = [ "<your name>" ]
changelog = '''
Your changelog in here.
'''

All plugins require an icon.png, which you need to provide inside of an images folder:

<manifest dir> /
  PluginA /
    images /
      icon.png
    manifest.toml
  PluginB /
    images /
      icon.png
    manifest.toml

Now your manifest folder is ready to go, we’ll move onto setting up the build system next.

Setting up and using Plogon #

Plogon is the preferred method of building plugins, and it’s used for the main Dalamud repository. It uses Docker to standardize the building process and takes care of repository state for you. Follow their README and continue this guide once you have a folder with a State.toml and your built plugins.

Creating the repo JSON #

Now that we have our built plugin DLLs, our new repository is almost usable inside of Dalamud. But Dalamud does not consume the State.toml directly, the plugin manifests need to be concentrated into a single JSON file. XLWebServices does this, but I built a smaller tool just for this purpose called DalamudRepoTool. Install it via Cargo:

cargo install --git https://github.com/redstrate/DalamudRepoTool.git

And then run it on your repository:

DalamudRepoTool --download-host <URL to your hosted repository without the stable channel path> --repo-path <your repository path where the State.toml is>

When it’s done, it will create a repo.json where the State.toml was. Your repository is complete and can now be used in Dalamud!