Best practices for testing plugins locally during Matterbridge development?

[Pierre-Gilles]

Hi @Luligu !

First of all, thank you for building and maintaining Matterbridge, it’s an awesome project!

I’m currently working on a YouTube video that walks through how to create a Matterbridge plugin, and I’m using the plugin template to illustrate the process.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

• Cloned the template repository locally
• Installed all dependencies
• Started the devcontainers
• Launched Matterbridge: everything is working great!
• Implemented some basic logic to simulate a simple On/Off switch
• Ran npm run matterbridge:add and successfully saw my plugin and its test device appear in the Matterbridge UI.

Now I’d love to test the behavior of my device.

Since Matterbridge runs in a devcontainer, I can’t directly pair it from an external controller. What’s your usual development workflow to test plugins in this case?

Do you have a recommended approach to quickly iterate and test without needing to publish the plugin or deploy it in a full setup every time?

Really appreciate any tips, and thanks again for your great work on this project!

Best,
Pierre-Gilles (Gladys Assistant)

[Luligu]

Hi,
thanks for your appreciations.

I can tell you how I work here:
The Matterbridge Plugin Dev Container leave the source code and the generated code (dist directory) outside the container for obvious reasons.

Outside the container on your host you should have an instance of matterbridge that you can use to add your plugin under development (once again matterbridge -add . from the plugin root directory or update the path accordingly if are in a different directory).

In this way you have an instance of matterbridge (this one can be paired) with added your local plugin under development.

Whenever you change the code in your plugin under development, just shutdown matterbridge, start it again and it will load the updated code.

This is also the approach to use in production if you are not ready to publish on npm. Plugins can run from local folders too.

[Luligu]

If you don't want or cannot have an instance of matterbridge on the host machine,
You can deploy (easily) the plugin under development in a production setup on different host without having to publish:

• from the plugin do 'npm run npmPack', this will produce a tgz file in the root directory of the plugin.
• from the production instance of matterbridge, choose upload and select your tgz, then restart like instructed.

[Luligu]

There is also a third option I use daily to test in a fully confined container environment on wsl 2,
I run docker compose with matterbridge, homeassistant and matterserver. There matterbridge is paired to matterserver that is linked to homeassistant (no supervisor so very easy and fast). All is localhost.
I deploy the tgz of the plugin (in my case also of matterbridge) like in the previous scenario.
When I don't need anymore I just shutdown that wsl 2 distro.