There are a lot of "meta" skills around Sketch plugin development that don't really have anything to do with building great plugin.
For example, the terminal. For those of us who didn't grow up on a unix shell, the terminal is an inscrutable box of cryptic and indecipherable commands. It's undoubtedly powerful, and a valuable skill to develop... but should it really be a pre-requisite for Sketch plugin development?
Skpm GUI is a free-to-use desktop application designed to make it easier to get started building Sketch plugins. It provides a friendly GUI for many of the typical tasks facing plugin developers:
- Creating new plugins
- Running a development server
- Executing tasks (building for production, running tests)
- Managing metadata (commands, menu)
- Managing dependencies (adding, updating, searching)
Skpm is made for beginners - folks who are just starting out with plugin development. We hope that it's powerful enough for advanced users as well, but we'll always prioritize the new-developer experience. We'll never charge money for Skpm, it'll always be free-to-use.
NOTE: This is super early pre-release alpha. Truthfully it's probably not ready for beginner usage yet (there may be some frustrating bugs). The goal is to build a community of folks to work on this and create something truly useful and wonderful for beginners.
This project is in early pre-release Alpha.
Want to help build something great for newcomers? We're actively looking for contributors to help develop this pre-release alpha into something amazing. This is a great time to get involved and help shape the future of Skpm!
Also, important to note: this is a side-project worked on during spare time. We appreciate any bug reports, but realistically we may not be able to fix issues in a timely manner (feel free to contribute fixes though!)
To use Skpm, you'll first need to have a modern version of Node (a Javascript runtime) installed. Download Node. The "Current" version is recommended over LTS due to a bug in NPM 5.6.0 that can corrupt dependencies.
Once Node is installed, you can download Skpm.
Double-click the downloaded executable to open Skpm. Mac users may need to right-click and select "Open" if MacOS complains about the fact that this was downloaded from the internet.
Note: In future stable releases, I hope to remove the need to download Node by using the Node runtime that comes with Skpm GUI (see #44). I also plan to create a proper installer so that it's easy to copy Skpm to the Applications folder (see #26). Contributions welcome!
Learn more about using Skpm in our Getting Started guide.
Unfortunately, Skpm is only available in English right now. Internationalization is being tracked in #66, although truthfully it's pretty far in the horizon.
In the meantime, some folks have started translating the docs into different languages! So, while the app is English-only, at least the docs are translated:
ไธญๆ/Chinese
Skpm GUI is an electron application that secretly runs terminal commands for you in the background. It uses the skpm CLI.
Skpm reads from your manifest.json to get the commands and plugin menu if any. It also reads from package.json to figure out the current dependencies, and see which tasks are available (via scripts).
Skpm has intelligent modules built around task types. For example, the dev mode is no ordinary task, it's one that ought to be running throughout your time working on the project, and so it's given its own module at the top of the page.
For more information on learning more about Skpm and contributing, see our contribution docs
Right now, Skpm's feature-set is pretty limited. It consists of 4 modules: a "dev-mode" pane, a "commands" pane, a "tasks" pane, and a "dependencies" pane.
The first big change I'd like to see is better support for common dev tools like running tests, linting, code formatting, and so on. Some examples of potential improvements:
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Testing shouldn't just be a thin row in a list, it should have its own module, like the Dev Mode does. It should run in "interactive" mode, and allow users to re-run tests by clicking buttons.
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Dependencies should be easy to update. I imagine an "update core dependencies" button that updates @skpm/builder, and any associated packages, with built-in codemod support. I imagine it being able to find security problems (via
npm audit).
I'd also like to see Skpm become far more useful for educating users about plugin development. The philosophy of Skpm is that anybody can learn plugin development, and it should provide resources to help learners along. Skpm has full access to the project code and settings, and so I wonder if there are opportunities to suggest solutions to problems the user runs into... I don't have any concrete ideas yet, but it's interesting to think about.
Skpm has an active community of contributors and collaborators that enjoy working together to continuously improve the application's form and function. Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project, you agree to abide by its terms. If you would like to get involved, have a look at our Contributing Guide!
ISC, Copyright 2018-present Joshua Comeau, Mathieu Dutour