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Part 2.1: Generate a new plugin from a Maven archetype template

This guide shows you how to generate a new plugin from a Maven archetype template.

A Maven archetype is used to define the structure of a Funnelback plugin and provides both the file structure and a set of template files required by a plugin.

Using a Maven archetype is the easiest way to setup a new plugin as this will create a new plugin by automatically fetching the current version of the template and running through a setup process that configures all the required options.

Prerequisites

Before using this guide ensure that you have installed Java, Apache Maven and IntelliJ on your computer as outlined in part 1: setting up your development environment.

Interactive setup

When the Maven command is run it will prompt for a number of required fields.

Open up a terminal and change to the folder that houses all of your plugins. If this is the first time creating a plugin then create a new folder to use for your plugin development. Each plugin that you develop will be in a sub-folder of this.

$ cd my-plugins-directory

Run the maven command.

$ mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=com.funnelback.plugin -DarchetypeArtifactId=plugin-archetypes -DarchetypeVersion=16.24.0
You should set the DarchetypeVersion to the current latest released version of the funnelback-shared library. The current version of Funnelback shared may be lower than the current version of Funnelback.

The archetype will ask you a series of questions which are used to generate the files for your new plugin.

See: Archetype questions for detailed information on each of the questions asked by the archetype generator.

For this tutorial we are going to create a plugin that cleans off a prefix from your search result titles. Answer the questions as follows:

This plugin will be implementing the search lifecycle interface (it’s implementing a hook script). No other plugin interfaces are required so we answer false when the archetype asks about these interfaces.

  • Define value for property 'gatherer': false

  • Define value for property 'facets': false

  • Define value for property 'indexing': false

  • Define value for property 'searchLifeCycle': true

  • Define value for property 'filtering': false

  • Define value for property 'jsoup-filtering': false

  • Define value for property 'search-servlet-filtering': false

  • Define value for property 'start-url-provider': false

  • Define value for property 'groupId': com.example.plugin

  • Define value for property 'artifactId': title-prefix

  • Define value for property 'plugin-name': Modify title prefix

  • Define value for property 'plugin-description': Use this plugin to modify the prefix of search result titles

  • Define value for property 'archetypeVersion': LATEST

  • Define value for property 'runs-on-datasource': false

  • Define value for property 'runs-on-result-page': true

  • Define value for property 'package': com.example.plugin.titleprefix

Once you have worked through all the questions you are asked to confirm your selections then Maven will generate a new folder generated called title-prefix, as a sub-folder to your my-plugins-directory. This folder contains all the files required to develop and package your plugin.

Next steps

The next tutorial shows how to import this project into IntelliJ and covers the anatomy of a plugin.

See also