Generate a Basic Plugin

Use the interactive plugin generator, which is itself a plugin, to create your own Salesforce CLI plugin.

1. Open a terminal (macOS, Linux) or command prompt (Windows) and change to the top-level directory where you want to generate your plugin. For example:

2. Run the interactive command:

   The Salesforce CLI plugin that contains the commands for generating new plugins, commands, and flags (plugin-dev) is "just in time" (JIT). This means that if you haven't explicitly installed the plugin, Salesforce CLI does it for you when you first run one of its commands.

   You're first prompted whether you're an internal Salesforce developer. The Salesforce CLI team uses this command to create plugins too! But answer n so you're not subject to our internal requirements. You're next prompted for information to populate your new plugin, such as its name, description, author, and percentage of code coverage you want. The command then clones either the plugin-template-sf or plugin-template-sf-external Github repo and installs the plugin's npm package dependencies using yarn install.

   After the dev generate plugin command completes, the new plugin contains an example hello world command. See this section for a description of some of the generated files.

Let's see how to run the commands in your new plugin.

1. Change to the new plugin directory, which is the same as the name you provided to the dev generate plugin command.

2. To run the commands of your in-development plugin from the top-level directory that your code lives in, precede the commands with bin/dev.js. For example, to run the sample hello world command:

   To view the --help output for the command:

   As you create new commands, test them the same way. For example:

3. When you’re ready to test drive your plugin, link your in-development plugin to Salesforce CLI. From the top-level plugin directory, such as my-plugin, run this command (be sure to include the period at the end!):

   The command installs your plugin in Salesforce CLI by creating a symlink to your my-plugin directory. After you link your plugin, you can run your commands without using bin/dev.js. For example:

   If you see this warning message, don't worry. It's expected and everything is working just fine.

   This warning means that your plugin is written with ESM (officially called ECMAScript modules), which is what our templates use. We can't auto compile ESM while running a command, which means you must make sure that you compile your plugin after every change. We recommend running yarn compile --watch in a separate terminal so that all your changes are compiled every time you save a file.

   The -h flag, which displays a shorter version of help messages, is available only when you link or install the plugin. It's not available when using bin/dev.js.

   To see which plugins you've installed or linked, including your new plugin, run:

   Your linked plugin is listed like this in the output:

   To unlink the plugin, run:

The sf plug-In Generator creates many files, some that support the entire plugin, some for the hello world command. This table describes a few of the main ones which you can use as templates when you start coding your own commands.