automate plugin packaging

[justme-1968]

i just found your repository yesterday and had a quick qo on a plugin for my home automation project. i really like writing a stremdeck plugin in swift, but after the first trials i got very annoyed with the manual packaging of the resulting plugin.

i first thought of using a package plugin for a post build step, but this is currently not possible. only pre build and build plugins currently.

then i just had a very quick and dirty go at a post-build step for the build scheme. unfortunately this seems to be also quite limited for packages, but with some brute force i got it to work.

maybe this is also useful for others...

prerequisites:

• a Tools directory on the same level as the plugin's Sources with the DistributionTool binary and the following createPlugin.sh script which should be executable
• a Resources directory, also on the same level as Sources, with everything else required for the finished plugin like Icons/..., previews/... and language json files

then add the script to a post-build phases of the relevant build schemes.

all this can be under source control

the script will create a plugin directory, assemble all the parts for the finished plugin and then call DistributionTool to create the packaged plugin there. and opens a finder window. you can just double click the .streamDeckPlugin file as usual to install the plugin into the streamdeck software.
a log file for the process is created in /tmp/

you probably want to exclude pluginfrom source control. or change the script to create it somewhere else.
the $URI should also adjusted to match the api specs and your prefix.

createPlugin.sh:

#/bin/sh

SELF=`basename $0 .sh`
exec > /tmp/${SELF}.log 2>&1

echo `date`

PROJECT_DIR=${WORKSPACE_PATH}/../../..
cd ${PROJECT_DIR}

RESULT_DIR=./plugin

echo "using `pwd` as project dir"
echo "using ${RESULT_DIR} as result dir"

rm -fr ${RESULT_DIR}
mkdir ${RESULT_DIR}

# as of the api doc this sould rather be something like com.….<plugin-name>
URI=${PRODUCT_NAME}

# create manifest & combine with binary 
${TARGET_BUILD_DIR}/${PRODUCT_NAME} export ${URI} --generate-manifest --copy-executable --output ${RESULT_DIR}

# copy resources like Icons, previews & translations to components dir
COMPONENTS_DIR=${RESULT_DIR}/${URI}.sdPlugin
cp -r Resources/* ${COMPONENTS_DIR}

# pack everything into the plugin
Tools/DistributionTool -b -i ${COMPONENTS_DIR} -o ${RESULT_DIR}

open ${RESULT_DIR}

[emorydunn]

Plugin packaging is definitely still a manual process, I have a similar shell script I use for automatically building and packaging my plugins. It might be worth expanding on how to package a plugin in the README.