Quickstart

This guide assumes two things are running:

1. A Spree API server (your Spree store's backend).
2. Your dashboard app — the small Vite project that renders the admin. In a create-spree-app project it lives at apps/dashboard/; add it to an existing project with npx spree add dashboard, or scaffold it anywhere with npx spree add dashboard --template pointing at your own copy. Start it with pnpm dev.

All customizations in this guide are edits to your dashboard app's own code. You don't need to scaffold a plugin — plugins are for distributing features to other stores.

The 30-second example

Add an "Analytics" item to the dashboard sidebar.

Step 1. Open src/plugins.ts — the starter ships this file already wired up — and register a nav entry:

import { defineDashboardPlugin } from '@spree/dashboard-core'
import { BarChartIcon } from 'lucide-react'

defineDashboardPlugin({
  nav: [{
    key: 'analytics',
    label: 'Analytics',
    path: '/analytics',
    icon: BarChartIcon,
    // Built-in entries use positions 100–600 (Home … Reports).
    // 650 places Analytics after Reports, at the end.
    position: 650,
  }],
})

Step 2. Save. The dev server hot-reloads and the sidebar now shows "Analytics".

Clicking it lands on a "Page not found" screen — we registered the nav entry but no page. Let's fix that.

Add the page

Step 3. Create the page component at src/pages/analytics.tsx:

import { PageHeader } from '@spree/dashboard-core'
import { ResourceLayout } from '@spree/dashboard-ui'

export function AnalyticsPage() {
  return (
    <ResourceLayout
      header={<PageHeader title="Analytics" subtitle="Store performance over time" />}
      main={<p>Coming soon.</p>}
    />
  )
}

Step 4. Register the route in src/plugins.ts:

import { defineDashboardPlugin } from '@spree/dashboard-core'
import { BarChartIcon } from 'lucide-react'
import { AnalyticsPage } from './pages/analytics'

defineDashboardPlugin({
  nav: [{
    key: 'analytics',
    label: 'Analytics',
    path: '/analytics',
    icon: BarChartIcon,
    position: 650,
  }],
  routes: [{
    key: 'analytics',
    path: '/analytics',
    component: AnalyticsPage,
  }],
})

Save. Click "Analytics" — your page renders inside the dashboard chrome, at /<store id>/analytics.

What just happened

defineDashboardPlugin registers extensions against the dashboard's shared registries: nav, routes, slots, tables, settingsNav, formFields, and customFieldComponents. Your src/plugins.ts runs when the app boots (the starter's main.tsx imports it), so everything is registered before the first render. These are the exact same APIs distributable plugins use — the only difference is packaging.

The custom route mounts under /<store id>/analytics. Routes registered this way are matched at navigation time, so they can even be registered lazily after boot.

Building a distributable plugin rather than customizing your own app? Ship pages as file routes instead — they compile into the app's route tree, so links to them are type-checked. The registry form shown here is for in-app customization.

Next steps

• Navigation — sidebar entries, nesting under built-in menus, settings sub-nav, permission gating
• Routes — path patterns, params, permission fallback
• Slots — inject widgets into built-in pages without forking them
• Tables — define your own list page or extend built-in tables
• Translations — add i18n keys without colliding with the framework