Setting up your development environment

Before you follow the development tutorials for creating a Zowe™ CLI plug-in, follow these steps to set up your environment.

Prequisites

Install Zowe CLI.

Initial setup

To create your development space, you will clone and build zowe-cli-sample-plugin from source.

Before you clone the repository, create a local development folder named zowe-tutorial. You will clone and build all projects in this folder.

Branches

There are two branches in the repository that correspond to different Zowe CLI versions. You can develop two branches of your plug-in so that users can install your plug-in into either @latest or @lts-incremental CLI. Developing for both versions will let you take advantage of new core features quickly and expose your plug-in to a wider range of users.

The lts-incremental branch of Sample Plug-in is compatible with the @lts-incremental version of core CLI (Zowe Stable release). The master branch of Sample Plug-in is compatible with @latest version of core CLI (Zowe Active Development release).

For more information about the versioning scheme, see Maintaner Versioning in the Zowe CLI repository.

Clone zowe-cli-sample-plugin and build from source

Clone the repository into your development folder to match the following structure:

zowe-tutorial

└── zowe-cli-sample-plugin

Follow these steps:

1. cd to your zowe-tutorial folder.
2. git clone https://github.com/zowe/zowe-cli-sample-plugin
3. cd to your zowe-cli-sample-plugin folder.
4. git checkout lts-incremental
5. npm install
6. npm run build

(Optional) Run the automated tests

We recommend running automated tests on all code changes. Follow these steps:

1. cd to the __tests__/__resources__/properties folder.
2. Copy example_properties.yaml to custom_properties.yaml.
3. Edit the properties within custom_properties.yaml to contain valid system information for your site.
4. cd to your zowe-cli-sample-plugin folder
5. npm run test

Next steps

After you complete your setup, follow the Installing the sample plug-in tutorial to install this sample plug-in to Zowe CLI.