Cordova Plugman

May 21, 2021 Cordova

Cordova plugman is a useful command line tool for installing and managing plug-ins. /b10> If you want your app to run on a specific platform, you should use plugman. /b11> If you are creating a cross-platform app, you should use cordova-cli, which modifies plug-ins for different platforms.

Step 1 - Install Plusman

Open the command prompt window and run the following snippets of code to install the pugman.

C:\Users\username\Desktop\CordovaProject>npm install -g plugman

Step 2 - Install the plug-in

To show you how to install the Cordova plug-in using pugman, we'll use the Camera plug-in as an example.

C:\Users\username\Desktop\CordovaProject>plugman 
   install --platform android --project platforms\android 
   --plugin cordova-plugin-camera
   plugman uninstall --platform android --project platforms\android 
   --plugin cordova-plugin-camera

There are three required parameters, as shown below.

- platform - the platform we use (android, ios, amazon-fire os, wp8, blackberry 10).
- Project - The path to the project build. /b10> In our example, it's the platforms, the android directory.
- plugin - the plug-in we want to install.

If you set valid parameters, the command prompt window should output the following.

Additional methods

You can uninstall the method in a similar way.

C:\Users\username\Desktop\CordovaProject>plugman uninstall 
   --platform android --project platforms\android --plugin cordova-plugin-camera

The command prompt console will have the following output.

Plugman provides some additional methods that you can use. /b10> You can see it in the table below.

Serial number	Method and description
1	install Used to install the Cordova plug-in.
2	uninstall Used to uninstall the Cordova plug-in.
3	fetch Used to copy the Cordova plug-in to a specific location.
4	prepare Used to update profiles to help with JS module support.
5	adduser Used to add user accounts to the registry.
6	publish Used to publish plug-ins to the registry.
7	unpublish Used to unsubscribe plug-ins from the registry.
8	search Used to search for plug-ins in the registry.
9	config Used for registry settings configuration.
10	create Used to create custom plug-ins.
11	platform Used to add or remove platforms from custom-created plug-ins.

Additional commands

If you're stuck, you can always use the plugman -help command. /b10> You can use plugman -v to check the version. /b11> To search for plug-ins, you can use plugman search, and finally you can use the plugman config set registry command to change the plug-in registry.

Attention

Because Cordova is typically used for cross-platform development, we'll install plug-ins using the Cordova CLI instead of Plugman in the next tutorial.