Setup

Prerequisites

Plugins are based on HTML5. You should be familiar with the following technologies:

The following prerequisites are required to develop plugins and to execute the examples:

Node.js (6.7 or later)
npm (installed with Node.js)
Access to your Cumulocity IoT account, i.e. you need your tenant ID, username and password.

Cumulocity IoT CLI tool

Once all prerequisites are met, you are almost ready to build your own application and plugin.

For the process of developing a plugin (building, theming, translating and deploying your applications and plugins), the npm package “cumulocity-tools” must be installed globally on your machine. To install the npm package, execute the following command on your terminal.

$ npm i cumulocity-tools -g

Now you are ready to use the command line interface (CLI) tool. Try it out by executing the following command:

$ c8y --help

The “–help” option displays all available commands for the CLI tool.

Cumulocity IoT UI package

As already described above, applications are always a collection of plugins. We provide a set of plugins you can build on in addition to your own. Prior to this, you must add a package.json file to the folder you will use for your application. To generate the package.json file automatically, simply run:

$ npm init

This command prompts you to enter values for several properties which will be included in the package.json file. The package.json file should include at least a name and version. To skip a property, press enter.

Then proceed to install the Cumulocity IoT UI package containing the set of plugins by typing in the following command:

$ c8y install latest

This command will:

Check for the latest version of the Cumulocity IoT UI package.
Download the package.
Add it as a dependency inside the package.json file.

Instead of “latest”, you can also specify a certain version number, but this version has to be the same or less than the backend version number.

Info: When sharing your project, other developers only need to run npm install inside the root folder of the application project, as the version of the Cumulocity IoT UI package is already defined as a dependency in the package.json file. You can always install other versions by running the c8y install command again.

You can see the list of plugins which an application uses by utilizing the command c8y util:showimports \[appContextPath\].