A Kimai plugin is from a technical perspective only a Symfony bundle, with some minor modifications.
Within the external communication it is called plugin instead of bundle, as this is the wording most users know.
Kimai plugins are stored in var/plugins/, for example var/plugins/YourBundle/.
The contents in var/plugins/* are listed in the .gitignore file to prevent update problems.
Installation should be done with git clone or with a copy task.
Make sure that you copy it into the appropriate subdirectory in var/plugins/.
For the plugin CustomCSSBundle this would be var/plugins/CustomCSSBundle/.
After the plugin was installed you need to clear the cache:
bin/console kimai:reload --env=prodIt is not advised, but in case the above command fails you could try:
rm -r var/cache/prod/*Depending on your setup, the cache flush will create directories which cannot be written by your webserver:
You have to allow PHP (your webserver process) to write to
var/ and it subdirectories.
Here is an example for Debian/Ubuntu (to be executed inside the Kimai directory):
chown -R :www-data .
chmod -R g+r .
chmod -R g+rw var/
Test Kimai before executing these commands (they are likely not required in a shared-hosting environment).
You probably need to prefix them with sudo and
the group might be called different than www-data.
The reason for using a slightly different approach than the proposed Symfony way is the recommended way to install and update Kimai with Git and Composer.
If you would install a bundle using composer, you would end up with a “dirty git status” and run
into problems when performing the next update (with changes in: bundles.php, composer.json, composer.lock, symfony.lock).
The application Kernel was slightly modified to allow dynamic plugin and route loading, to prevent this from happening.
There are some differences to Symfony bundles, which were added to prevent problems during core updates:
var/plugins/ instead of vendor/
config/bundles.php)var/plugins/YourBundle/Resources/config/routes.{php,xml,yaml,yml}
KimaiPlugin
App\Plugin\PluginInterface
The namespace is pre-registered in composer with the vendor segment locked to KimaiPlugin,
pointing to var/plugins/ to prevent that users have to dump a new autoloader after installing a plugin.
The minimal directory structure must look like this:
var/plugins/YourBundle
├── DependencyInjection
│ └── YourExtension.php
├── Resources
│ └── config
│ └── services.yaml
├── YourBundle.php
├── composer.json
└ ... more files and directories follow here ...
Even though its called plugin in Kimai, the namespace and classes still need to follow the official Symfony bundle naming conventions.
namespace KimaiPlugin\YourBundle;
use App\Plugin\PluginInterface;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\ContainerBuilder;
use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Bundle\Bundle;
class YourBundle extends Bundle implements PluginInterface
{
}
namespace KimaiPlugin\YourBundle\DependencyInjection;
use Symfony\Component\Config\FileLocator;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\ContainerBuilder;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Loader;
use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\DependencyInjection\Extension;
class YourExtension extends Extension
{
public function load(array $configs, ContainerBuilder $container)
{
$loader = new Loader\YamlFileLoader(
$container,
new FileLocator(__DIR__ . '/../Resources/config')
);
$loader->load('services.yaml');
}
}
services:
_defaults:
autowire: true
autoconfigure: true
public: false
bind:
KimaiPlugin\YourBundle\:
resource: '../../*'
exclude: '../../{Resources}'
Your plugin needs to ship a composer.json, even if it is not used for installation. Kimai will read values from it for extended information in the plugins admin panel.
A minimal composer.json could look like this:
{
"name": "foo/your-bundle",
"description": "A Kimai 2 demo plugin which does nothing",
"homepage": "https://www.kimai.org/",
"type": "kimai-plugin",
"version": "0.1",
"license": "MIT",
"authors": [
{
"name": "Kevin Papst",
"email": "kpapst@gmx.net",
"homepage": "https://www.kimai.org"
}
],
"extra": {
"kimai": {
"require": "1.3",
"name": "YourBundle"
}
}
}
The type (kimai-plugin)is required for proper installation if composer is used.
The homepage will be used for a backlink in the plugin admin panel.
The version will be shown in the plugin admin panel.
The values in the extra.kimai section are used for:
require - the required (minimal) Kimai which is needed for this pluginname - the name of the plugin, used as target directory name of your bundleWhen your plugin wants to store files, don’t use your plugin directory or concat the directory yourself, but
use the ServiceContainer parameter %kimai.data_dir%. This is currently pointing to var/data/ and also protected
from the above-mentioned update problems via .gitignore.
As this could change in the future, always inject the data directory instead of finding a place yourself:
services:
KimaiPlugin\YourBundle\MyController:
arguments:
$dataDirectory: "%kimai.data_dir%"
There is another parameter called %kimai.plugin_dir%, which is pointing to the base directory of all plugins.
There is an official demo bundle which has many code examples for extension points.
You can also have a look at the CustomCSSBundle which serves as bundle demo:
%kimai.data_dir%
If you created a plugin or any other kind of software around Kimai which you want to see listed in the Marketplace, head over to the Marketplace documentation to find out how.