Confluence Docs 3.0 : UPT 1 - Getting Started This page last changed on Feb 20, 2008 by jnolen. ### Set up the Plugin Source Directory First things first, I'm going to need somewhere to put all my source code. The How to Build an Atlassian Plugin contains a template directory that you can rename to use for your own plugin. Having a standard directory structure is useful, because it allows you to use maven (or the ant tasks packaged in the `plugins` directory of your Confluence installation) to build your plugin jar. If you use a different directory structure, you'll have to build the plugin yourself. You'll have to think of a name for your plugin. There are probably better names than `userinfo`, but I started this late on a Thursday afternoon. Also, you'll need a package name for your Java code. The Java standard for package names is to reverse your company's domain-name, which is exactly what I've done here: I'm going to be doing all my development for this tutorial in the `plugins` directory of a copy of Confluence 2.2.5 that I downloaded from the Atlassian website
| The Unreliable Narrator In fact, I'll be doing all of my development in the same development environment I use to develop Confluence itself. I will then be copying it into the aforementioned plugins directory and taking screenshots, and pretending that's how I developed it in the first place. In cooking shows, this would be called "...and here's one I prepared earlier."
### Make an Empty `atlassian-plugin.xml` file. You'll need to choose a unique plugin key. I can use the `confluence.extra` prefix for my plugin keys because I work at Atlassian. You should make your plugin key the same as the Java package name you chose earlier. You should also fill in the plugin metadata.
    <atlassian-plugin name='User Information' key='confluence.extra.userinfo'>
        <plugin-info>
            <description>Allows users to store personal data/contact details about themselves</description>
            <vendor name="Atlassian Software Systems" url="http://www.atlassian.com"/>
            <version>1.0</version>
        </plugin-info>
    </atlassian-plugin>
Once again, there's a template file in the Plugin Development Kit. ### Compile and Upload The plugin can now be built and installed into Confluence. I have no idea why you'd want to do it, but it's sort of necessary to come away from each step in a tutorial with some tangible evidence you've accomplished something. So here's what my new plugin looks like when I upload it into Confluence's plugin manager: That's it. A plugin with no plugin modules. Next, we write some code! ### Downloads The source for the empty plugin: userinfo-src-1.tgz The compiled empty plugin jar: plugins-userinfo-1.jar Attachments: starting-file-structure.png (image/png) build-terminal.png (image/png) upload-plugin.png (image/png) empty-plugin-module.png (image/png) userinfo-src-1.tgz (application/x-gzip) plugins-userinfo-1.jar (application/java-archive)

Document generated by Confluence on Nov 05, 2009 23:34