Support for creating plugins

After a brief Gitter discussion I thought it might be worth starting a discussion here. The idea is to support something like au new --plugin or au new-plugin which would output something like https://github.com/aurelia/skeleton-plugin.

Has this already been discussed? Is there interest in adding a feature like this? I could probably start looking at it if there is.

[manuel-guilbault]

@xdvarpunen @JeroenVinke hopefully I’ll be able to get it done in the upcoming weeks

[CuddleBunny]

Thanks @fkleuver and @huochunpeng. I guess this bit on structure needs broken out into a few different areas: generated project structure, plugin structure, and CLI project structure.

On Project Structure I can see having separate folders being a bit confusing for the bundler and perhaps even the end user. This seems to boil down to using one of two approaches, at least for starters:

├── aurelia-cli-project
│   ├── dist
│   ├── examples
│   ├── src

au run - build and run Aurelia app(s) in examples that depend on the plugin in src.
au build - build the plugin in src

vs.

├── aurelia-cli-project
│   ├── dist
│   ├── src
│   │   ├── resources

au run/au build - same as application project
new command like au package plugin? - build plugin from src/resources

Option 1 has clear separation but decouples the build and run commands which may be counterintuitive. Option 2 doesn’t require any changes to existing commands but may require a new command to help users package their plugins for distribution.

On Plugin Structure I think this should stay relatively simple and unopinionated like the application template. Something along these lines:

https://gist.github.com/CuddleBunny/a4a51c6f02a27f0219eda3ba4310e307

On CLI Project Structure I’ve been digging through this and it seems very flexible. Everything has its place so I don’t think we need to talk much through this.