Adding plugins to your development environment

To add a i2 Notebook plugin to your deployment of i2 Analyze, you must develop an i2 Notebook SDK plugin. For more information about developing plugins, see i2 Notebook SDK.

To use i2 Notebook, you must configure the following:

To access i2 Notebook, a user must have the i2:Notebook command access control permission. To add the i2:Notebook permission to the command-access-control.xml file, see Enabling access to the i2 Notebook web client.
The deployment must contain the Chart Store or Information Store. Ensure that the DEPLOYMENT_PATTERN variable in the <config_name>/utils/variables.conf file is set to a pattern that includes one of these stores.
For example:
```
DEPLOYMENT_PATTERN="istore"
```

Process overview:

Add a plugin to the environment
Update the config to reference plugins
Deploy the config

Adding a plugin

An i2 Notebook plugin consists of:

The plugin manifest, which is a JSON file that contains configuration details.
The plugin entry point, which is a JavaScript file that is loaded directly into i2 Notebook.

Additionally, a plugin can include:

HTML pages and associated JavaScript, CSS, or image files that provide a user interface. For more information, see tool views.

Create a directory for the plug-in inside the i2a-plugins directory. The name of the directory in the name for the plugin. Do not use spaces or special characters in the name.
Copy your plugin files into the directory. The entry point and manifest at the top level in your <plugin_name> directory. The directory structure is:
```
- i2a-plugins
    - <plugin_name>
        - plugin.json
        - entrypoint.js
        - ...
```

Referencing a plugin in a config

In the configuration you want to deploy your plugin with, update the /configs/<config_name>/configuration/plugin-references.json file and add the name of your plugin in the plugins array.
For example, to add the plugin named example-plugin, the plugin-references.json file contains the following:
```
{
    "plugins": [
        {
            "name": "example-plugin"
        }
    ]
}
```

Redeploying

Use the deploy command to deploy the config with the plugin.

deploy

If you have multiple configs, specify the config name with -c <config-name>.