How to publish a Silverstripe CMS module#

After you've created your own Silverstripe module, you could decide to make it open source and share it with the world.

If you wish to submit your module to our public directory, you take responsibility for a certain level of code quality, adherence to conventions, writing documentation, and releasing updates.

Silverstripe CMS uses Composer to manage module releases and dependencies between modules. If you plan on releasing your module to the public, ensure that you provide a composer.json file in the root of your module containing the meta-data about your module.

For more information about what your composer.json file should include, consult the Composer Documentation.

// mycustommodule/composer.json
{
  "name": "my-vendor/my-module",
  "description": "One-liner describing your module",
  "homepage": "http://github.com/my-vendor/my-module",
  "keywords": ["silverstripe", "some-tag", "some-other-tag"],
  "license": "BSD-3-Clause",
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Your Name","email": "your@email.com"
    }
  ],
  "support": {
    "issues": "http://github.com/my-vendor/my-module/issues"
  },
  "require": {
    "silverstripe/cms": "^4",
    "silverstripe/framework": "^4"
  },
  "autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
      "MyVendor\\MyModule\\": "src/"
    }
  },
  "extra": {
    "installer-name": "my-module",
    "expose": [
      "client"
    ],
    "screenshots": [
      "relative/path/screenshot1.png",
      "http://myhost.com/screenshot2.png"
    ]
  }
}

Once your module is published online with a service like GitHub.com or bitbucket.com, submit the repository to Packagist to have the module accessible to developers.

Note that Silverstripe CMS modules have the following distinct characteristics:

• Silverstripe CMS can hook in to the composer installation process by declaring type: silverstripe-vendormodule.
• Any folder which should be exposed to the public webroot must be declared in the extra.expose config. These paths will be automatically rewritten to public urls which don't directly serve files from the vendor folder. For instance, vendor/my-vendor/my-module/client will be rewritten to _resources/my-vendor/my-module/client.
• Any module which uses the folder expose feature must require silverstripe/vendor-plugin in order to support automatic rewriting and linking. For more information on this plugin you can see the silverstripe/vendor-plugin GitHub page.

Linking to resources in vendor modules uses exactly the same syntax as non-vendor modules. For example, this is how you would require a script in this module:

use SilverStripe\View\Requirements;

Requirements::javascript('my-vendor/my-module:client/js/script.js');

Releasing versions#

Over time you may have to release new versions of your module to continue to work with newer versions of Silverstripe CMS. By using Composer, this is made easy for developers by allowing them to specify what version they want to use. Each version of your module should be a separate branch in your version control and each branch should have a composer.json file explicitly defining what versions of Silverstripe CMS you support.

Say you have a module which supports Silverstripe CMS 3.0. A new release of this module takes advantage of new features in Silverstripe CMS 3.1. In this case, you would create a new branch for the 3.0 compatible code base of your module. This allows you to continue fixing bugs on this older release branch.

Other branches should be created on your module as needed if they're required to support specific Silverstripe CMS releases.

You can have an overlap in supported versions, e.g. two branches in your module both support Silverstripe CMS 3.1. In this case, you should explain the differences in your README.md file.

Here's some common values for your require section (see getcomposer.org for details):

• 3.0.*: Version 3.0, including 3.0.1, 3.0.2 etc, excluding 3.1
• ~3.0: Version 3.0 or higher, including 3.0.1 and 3.1 etc, excluding 4.0
• ~3.0,<3.2: Version 3.0 or higher, up until 3.2, which is excluded
• ~3.0,>3.0.4: Version 3.0 or higher, starting with 3.0.4