Developing plugins locally

[hemangsk]

Hello everyone!

So, I want to share what my local development process looks like while developing a capacitor plugin. I'm trying to find ways to optimise it and really look forward to hearing tips / feedback / ideas from the dev workflow you are using. Hope it helps new plugin developers as well.

Till Capacitor v2, Here's what my dev workflow looked like:

Project setup:

1. create a playground ionic + capacitor application
2. Install native IDEs, XCode and Android Studio
3. install my local working copy of the plugin with npm link in the playground project.

Daily Dev workflow

1. ionic cap run ios --livereload --external
2. In XCode, Edit native code in the Pods > directory and do Cmd + R to rebuild and view results in the simulator.
3. In VScode / sublime, edit typescript API , (definitions, web.ts, index.ts) and save to see results in the same simulator.

This setup was what I used for Capacitor v2. Now with Cap v3 and Ionic v6, ionic cap run ios --livereload --external doesn't open the native IDE. Instead, it display a list of simulators + real devices to chose from and then proceeds to start a live reload server which is great for application development! But for plugin dev, we also need native IDE for better DX. What works for me now is doing npx cap open ios followed by ionic cap run ios --livereload --external.