Developer guide

Elwing is a bootstrapped companion app to the Cloudscape design system. Its opinionated layout accelerates development time by exposing a simple plugin API. Developers can use the plugin API to focus on defining pages and content instead of app structure.

Prerequisites

1. Install NodeJS 18

Run

1. Run npm i from the same directory as this readme.
2. Run npm start.

What is a plugin?

A plugin is a JavaScript Object that contains the following properties:

• navigationItem - A Cloudscape SideNavigationProps object.
• component - The component that displays when choosing the link in the sidebar.

Add a plugin

⚠️ Important

The automated steps overwrite the manifest.ts file with the latest plugins from the plugins directory.

Add a plugin automatically

A convenience script is included to support quick plugin creation.

1. Run npm run create-plugin <plugin-name>.
2. Find your plugin in the plugins directory.
3. Modify the generated code to match your use case.

Add a plugin manually

You can choose to create a plugin manually instead of using the script.

1. Create a new folder in the plugins directory. For example, my-plugin.
2. Add an index.ts file to the folder. Refer to the following example to populate the file.

const MyPlugin = {
  navigationItem: {
    text: "My Plugin",
    href: "/my_plugin",
    type: "expandable-link-group",
    items: [{
      type: "link",
      text: "Cloudscape Design System",
      href: "https://cloudscape.design/",
      external: true
    }],
  } as SideNavigationProps.ExpandableLinkGroup,
    component: lazy(() => import("./src/MyPluginComponent")),
  };

export { MyPlugin };

3. Add a MyPlugin.tsx file to the folder and populate it with component code.

const Component = () => <h1>Hello, my-component!</h1>;
export default Component;

4. Open plugins/manifest.ts and add your plugin to the plugins array.

import { AppPlugin } from "./AppPlugin";
import { MyPlugin } from "./my-plugin";
const plugins: AppPlugin[] = [MyPlugin];
export default plugins;

Troubleshoot

• Static files like the README are not updating in the client.
  • This is likely a caching problem. Run rm -rf node_modules/.cache.