Publishing a plugin in Plugin Portal Update Center
Plugins that satisfy minimal Quality Criteria and also meet basic Update Center Requirements can get to the official NetBeans Plugin Portal Update Center (PPUC).
To be able to publish a plugin on PPUC, plugin must be verified.
Procedure how to start verification process:
- Make sure that plugin satisfies Update Center Requirements and also meets Quality Criteria
- Login to netbeans.org website and go to the NetBeans Plugin Portal
- Click My Plugins link from the user navigation toolbar
- Click the plugin to be verified
- Under Verifications for NetBeans versions section select the NetBeans IDE version that you want the plugin verified for
- Click request Verification button
More details can be found HERE.
Requirements for verification process:
If you want to get plugin to the NetBeans Plugin Portal Update Center, plugin must successfully pass verification process. In order to ask for such verification, the plugin must satisfy the following requirements:
1. The plugin has author
To make sure plugin has a non-empty author, right click the project node in the Explorer view and invoke Properties from its popup menu. Select Build > Packaging category and write your name to Author textfield. This will assure that module descriptor of plugin (/Info/info.xml)
will contain <module moduleauthor="Your Name"
attribute.
Current value: Open Source Software Development Center, Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade
2. The plugin has description
To provide at least short description of the plugin, right click the project node in the Explorer view and invoke Properties from its popup menu. Select Display category and write few words about plugin to Short Description textfield. This will assure that module descriptor of plugin(/Info/info.xml)
will contain <module ...><manifest OpenIDE-Module-Short-Description="easyUML is simple, easy to use NetBeans UML Plugin"
attribute.
Current values
Display Name: easyUml
Display Category: UML
Short Description: easyUML is simple, easy to use NetBeans UML Plugin
Long Description: easyUML provides UML drawing features, code generation and creation of UML class diagrams from Java code. It is being developed at Open Source Software Development Center at Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade.
3. The plugin has license
Plugin must bundle its license. In order to do this, create a text file with license terms e.g. My own license and invoke Properties action on plugin's project node. Select Build > Packaging category and click Browse button to navigate to license file. This will assure that module descriptor of plugin (/Info/info.xml)
will contain <module license="..."><license name="...">My own license</license>
non-default license.
Current Licence location: LICENSE-2.0.txt
Apache License - Version 2.0, January 2004
4. The plugin is signed
Finally, plugin must be signed. Plugin Portal considers your NBM signed if it finds /META-INF/<your_signature>.DSA
(or /META-INF/<your_signature>.RSA
) and /META-INF/<your_signature>.SF
files in it.
Signing steps:
- Create a keystore with genkey task.
- Using the defined module list (
${modules}
this is defined by the IDE itself) go to all your modules and add the keystore location and alias information in itsnbproject/private/platform-private.properties
file. - Call Netbeans build task so everything keeps going.
Detailed information can be found HERE.
Changing the version of the module
To change the version of the module, right click the project node in the Explorer view and invoke Properties from its popup menu. Select API versioning category and change Specification version to desired value.