Solar2D Native users can enable plugins hosted on third-party servers. This allows you to use third party plugins as well as creating plugins for internal use and leveraging Solar2D's rapid build process with native code that you've written.
Plugins must be packaged for each platform separately as a .tgz
file and hosted on a web server.
Follow the Plugins guide to build your plugin. Remember that for each support platform, a separate archive has to be packaged.
Building the plugin-in to be hosted on a web server, a few simple extra steps are required:
package-plugin
. Create a folder named iphone
within package-plugin
..a
) file of your plugin into that directory.resources
. For instance, *.nib
files for views. If your plugin depends on other frameworks, place all the compiled frameworks underneath a directory called Frameworks
.metadata.lua
file also in the directory package-plugin
deploy.sh
:#!/bin/bash tar -czf iphone.tgz libplugin_YOUR-PLUGIN.a metadata.lua resources scp ../iphone.tgz "[email protected]:/var/www/YOUR_DOMAIN/plugins"
Finally, for those who will use your Self-Hosted-Plugin, they have to add the location (www.YOUR_DOMAIN.com/plugins/android.tgz
) into their build.settings
so that the build proccess for Solar2D Apps can find the plugin (see also below).
Building the plugin-in to be published on a web server, a few simple extra steps are required:
Create a directory for packaging, for instance package-plugin
. Create a folder named android
within package-plugin
.
Create a new gradle file, called corona.gradle
and copy all your dependencies and repository definitions from your plugin's build.gradle
also into that file.
Place the metadata.lua
file also in the directory package-plugin
Use a simple packaging script to copy the build result into this directory and to call the zip/tar program. On Mac you could use the following lines, for instance, placed into a shell script deploy.sh
:
#!/bin/bash cp ../../build/outputs/aar/plugin-release.aar . COPYFILE_DISABLE=true tar -czf ../"$(basename "$(pwd)").tgz" --exclude='.[^/]*' ./* scp ../android.tgz "[email protected]:/var/www/YOUR_DOMAIN/plugins"
Finally, for those who will use your Self-Hosted-Plugin, they have to add the location (www.YOUR_DOMAIN.com/plugins/android.tgz
) into their build.settings
so that the build proccess for Solar2D Apps can find the plugin (see also below).
The plugin needs to be stored in a flat (no directories) .tgz
format. For example, from inside your plugin build folder, run:
COPYFILE_DISABLE=true tar -czf myplugin.tgz myplugin.lua metadata.lua
Upload the resulting .tgz
file to a web server that is accessible from the Internet. If necessary, https://
and basic authentication are supported for security and access control. You can use localhost
as web server too, since builds are local now. Note that this way machine performing the build would have to run the server.
Solar2D Simulator only accesses hosted plugins for device builds. When it comes to running these plugins in the Simulator, you can install these plugins locally by placing the plugin file in the following directory:
~/Library/Application Support/Corona/Simulator/Plugins/
This file should match the name used as the key in the plugins
table, for example "plugin.hostedplugin"
in the build.settings
example below.
In order to use hosted plugins with your Solar2D project, the following changes to build.settings
must be made:
.tgz
file.In the
supportedPlatforms
table for the plugin, each platform property key's value should contain the URL pointing to the.tgz
plugin file.
.tgz
file or point to URL with a plugin or Lua stub.In the
supportedPlatforms
table for the plugin, themacos
andwin32
key values should befalse
. If you wish to use the plugin in the Solar2D Simulator, you can install the plugin locally as noted above or download it from the URL.
Here is an example of including a hosted plugin within build.settings
:
settings = { plugins = { ["plugin.hostedplugin"] = { publisherId = "com.company", supportedPlatforms = { iphone = { url="https://test:[email protected]/plugin/iphone.tgz" }, android = { url="https://test:[email protected]/plugin/android.tgz" }, ["mac-sim"] = false, ["win32-sim"] = false }, }, }, }
Note, that if no Simulator urls are there Solar2D Simulator will throw an error on launch/relaunch saying that the plugin couldn't be downloaded. This message is safe to ignore.
Local storage can be used instead of web server. To do this, rename resulting archive to data.tgz
, and put it into Solar2DPlugins/<publiserId>/<plugin.name>/<platform>/data.tgz
. The Solar2DPlugins
can be found at ~/Solar2DPlugins
on macOS or %APPDATA%\Solar2DPlugins
on Windows.
Platform can be one of:
android
android-kindle
appletvos
appletvsimulator
html5
iphone
iphone-sim
mac-sim
macos
win32
win32-sim
lua
For example, to replace bit plugin for iPhone Simulator while building on macOS place archive at ~/Solar2DPlugins/com.coronalabs/plugin.bit/iphone-sim/data.tgz
Note that this plugins would always be used before any other type of plugins.