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How to create a Kimai plugin

Kimai 1.30.0 2.15.0 (latest version)

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.

Plugin management (install, uninstall & deactivate)

Read the chapter Plugin management.

Kimai plugins vs. pure Symfony bundles

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:

  • Kimai plugins are stored in var/plugins/ instead of vendor/
  • Kimai plugins are loaded automatically in each environment (no need to modify config/bundles.php)
  • Routes are automatically loaded with the search pattern:
    var/plugins/YourBundle/Resources/config/routes.{php,yaml}
  • Your Bundle class needs to be namespaced with the vendor segment KimaiPlugin
  • Your Bundle must implement 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.

Directory structure

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.

YourBundle.php

namespace KimaiPlugin\YourBundle;

use App\Plugin\PluginInterface;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\ContainerBuilder;
use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Bundle\Bundle;

class YourBundle extends Bundle implements PluginInterface
{
}

DependencyInjection/YourExtension.php

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');
    }
}

Resources/config/services.yaml

services:
    _defaults:
        autowire: true
        autoconfigure: true
        public: false
        bind:

    KimaiPlugin\YourBundle\:
        resource: '../../*'
        exclude: '../../{Resources}'

composer.json

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 simple demo plugin for Kimai, which actually 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": 20000,
            "name": "Your awesome bundle"
        }
    }
}

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 mandatory and used for:

  • require - the required (minimal) Kimai which is needed for this plugin as int (calculate like that: major * 10000 + minor * 100 + patch, e.g. 2.1.7 = 20107)
  • name - the name of the plugin, as shown in the administration

Data storage

When your plugin wants to store files, don’t use your plugin directory or concat the directory yourself, but use the global directory configured for Kimai.

Please use App\Utils\FileHelper to access files in the data directory

Example plugin

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:

  • A bundle with an extension to load service definitions
  • Additional routes
  • An admin controller with form usage, flash messages and an additional view
  • EventSubscriber to extend the navigation
  • Translations
  • Data storage in %kimai.data_dir%

List your plugin

If you created a plugin or any other kind of software around Kimai which you want to see listed in the Plugins, head over to the documentation to find out how.

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