Documentation about plugin zip

[farhanmaba]

I wanted to contribute to the project and realized that the documentation doesn't explain how to build and package the plugin to able test it in our WordPress installations. I found this with David's help (I don't know his handler) and I thought this needs to be included in the documentation.

[jeffpaul]

What's the use case for having that documented?

Somewhat related to https://github.com/WordPress/ai/blob/develop/docs/RELEASE_INSTRUCTIONS.md.

[justlevine]

Hey @jeffpaul - the use case that came up at WCEU was being able to share and test a clean distribution zip of a specific code change etc, free of dotfiles, node_modules/vendor, tests etc

Right now you need to infer the correct process from the GH workflow.

I haven't had time to review the provenance of the current docs to understand what's intentional vs an initial scaffold artifact and where something like this would make sense, but here's an example from mcp-adapter: https://github.com/WordPress/mcp-adapter/blob/trunk/CONTRIBUTING.md#building-the-plugin-for-distribution

[jeffpaul]

So there's the Playground test link on PRs and the ZIP that's built for that, if we exposed a direct link to the ZIP alongside the Playground button would that suffice?

[justlevine]

IMO nope, still not the use case. The intent is explicitly in the ability to run the flow, and shouldn't require the creation of a PR to do so. E.g. a security fix from a temporary fork that we want to get broader testing on.

Another way to think about this: somebody needs to be able to maintain the build-plugin-zip.yml and our package.json files. broadly speaking anything that CI can do, humans (or local agents) should be able to do as well.

[jeffpaul]

Does something like

ai/package.json

Line 29 in df23bd9

"build": "npm run build:legacy && npm run build:routes",

or

ai/package.json

Line 36 in df23bd9

"plugin-zip": "wp-scripts plugin-zip",

suffice for something like this? If so perhaps we add this explicitly within https://github.com/WordPress/ai/blob/develop/docs/DEVELOPER_GUIDE.md?

[justlevine]

Hey @farhanmaba was great collaborating with you at Contributor Day!

For others looking for an answer to this in the interim.

// switch to the correct NPM version
nvm use
// install npm deps
npm ci 

// install composer prod deps
composer install --no-dev

// build the plugin assets
npm run build

// create the installable .zip file
npm run plugin-zip