How to Publish a SilverStripe module.

If you wish to submit your module to our public directory, you take responsibility for a certain level of code quality, adherence to conventions, writing documentation, and releasing updates.

SilverStripe uses Composer to manage module releases and dependencies between modules. If you plan on releasing your module to the public, ensure that you provide a composer.json file in the root of your module containing the meta-data about your module.

For more information about what your composer.json file should include, consult the Composer Documentation.

A basic usage of a module for 3.1 that requires the CMS would look similar to this:

mycustommodule/composer.json

{
  "name": "your-vendor-name/module-name",
  "description": "One-liner describing your module",
  "type": "silverstripe-module",
  "homepage": "http://github.com/your-vendor-name/module-name",
  "keywords": ["silverstripe", "some-tag", "some-other-tag"],
  "license": "BSD-3-Clause",
  "authors": [
    {"name": "Your Name","email": "your@email.com"}
  ],
  "support": {
    "issues": "http://github.com/your-vendor-name/module-name/issues"
  },
  "require": {
    "silverstripe/cms": "^4",
    "silverstripe/framework": "^4"
  },
  "extra": {
    "installer-name": "module-name",
    "screenshots": [
      "relative/path/screenshot1.png",
      "http://myhost.com/screenshot2.png"
    ]
  }
}

Once your module is published online with a service like Github.com or Bitbucket.com, submit the repository to Packagist to have the module accessible to developers. It'll automatically get picked up by addons.silverstripe.org website.

Vendor modules

By default silverstripe-module type libraries are installed to the root web folder, however a new type silverstripe-vendormodule allows you to publish your module to the vendor directory.

The below is an example of a vendor module composer.json:

{
    "name": "tractorcow/test-vendor-module",
    "description": "Test module for silverstripe/vendor-plugin",
    "type": "silverstripe-vendormodule",
    "require": {
        "silverstripe/vendor-plugin": "^1.0",
        "silverstripe/cms": "^4.0"
    },
    "license": "BSD-3-Clause",
    "autoload": {
        "psr-4": {
            "TractorCow\\TestVendorModule\\": "src/"
        }
    },
    "extra": {
        "expose": [
            "client"
        ]
    },
    "minimum-stability": "dev"
}

Note that these modules have the following distinct characteristics:

Library type is silverstripe-vendormodule
Any folder which should be exposed to the public webroot must be declared in the extra.expose config. These paths will be automatically rewritten to public urls which don't directly serve files from the vendor folder. For instance, vendor/tractorcow/test-vendor-module/client will be rewritten to resources/tractorcow/test-vendor-module/client.
Any module which uses the folder expose feature must require silverstripe/vendor-plugin in order to support automatic rewriting and linking. For more information on this plugin you can see the silverstripe/vendor-plugin github page.

Linking to resources in vendor modules uses exactly the same syntax as non-vendor modules. For example, this is how you would require a script in this module:

Requirements::javascript('tractorcow/test-vendor-module:client/js/script.js');

Releasing versions

Over time you may have to release new versions of your module to continue to work with newer versions of SilverStripe. By using Composer, this is made easy for developers by allowing them to specify what version they want to use. Each version of your module should be a separate branch in your version control and each branch should have a composer.json file explicitly defining what versions of SilverStripe you support.

Say you have a module which supports SilverStripe 3.0. A new release of this module takes advantage of new features in SilverStripe 3.1. In this case, you would create a new branch for the 3.0 compatible code base of your module. This allows you to continue fixing bugs on this older release branch.

As a convention, the `master` branch of your module should always work with the `master` branch of SilverStripe.

Other branches should be created on your module as needed if they're required to support specific SilverStripe releases.

You can have an overlap in supported versions, e.g two branches in your module both support SilverStripe 3.1. In this case, you should explain the differences in your README.md file.

Here's some common values for your require section (see getcomposer.org for details):

3.0.*: Version 3.0, including 3.0.1, 3.0.2 etc, excluding 3.1
~3.0: Version 3.0 or higher, including 3.0.1 and 3.1 etc, excluding 4.0
~3.0,<3.2: Version 3.0 or higher, up until 3.2, which is excluded
~3.0,>3.0.4: Version 3.0 or higher, starting with 3.0.4

5.2 KiB Raw Blame History

How to Publish a SilverStripe module.

Vendor modules

Releasing versions

5.2 KiB

Raw Blame History