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Provide a test environment

note

Provisioning is not required as part of the plugin submission process but it will speed the reviewing process. Refer to Plugin submission review for more details.

Developers often ask us how long it takes for a plugin to be reviewed for publishing to the Grafana plugin catalog. Although we can't provide estimates, there's ways to reduce cycle times.

By far the most time consuming aspect of a plugin's review is the creation of a suitable test environment so we can verify its behavior. This step often involves a number of back-and-forth conversations between the plugin developer and the review team.

To improve the review time, add provisioning to your plugin. Provisioning refers to the process of preparing and configuring a test environment within the plugin's Docker development environment.

Why provisioning test environments?​

There are several benefits to provisioning:

  • Much faster review times. If you provision your plugin prior to submission, your wait for the review will be much shorter.
  • Easier contributions. By having an out-of-the-box working example available, would-be contributors to your plugin can easily experiment with additions to the plugin and raise pull requests.
  • Easier set up for e2e tests. By provisioning dashboards, e2e tests can run against specific scenarios across local development and in CI.
  • Improved clarity. We have found that provisioned plugins make it easier for tech-savvy users to understand how the plugin works.

How to provide a test environment​

You can configure Grafana to have resources installed and enabled through a mechanism known as provisioning, where resources are configured in a YAML file under a /provisioning directory.

Starting in v2.8.0, create-plugin generates provisioning capabilities for all plugin types (apps, scenes-apps, datasources, panels) and includes a sample dashboard.

What do you need to do?​

To provision follow these steps:

  1. Run the create-plugin tool to generate the provisioning folder with additional files based on the plugin type selected.
  2. When you run the Docker development environment, these files are used to automatically install (and if applicable, enable) your plugin and a sample dashboard.

Notes:

  • Use and update the sample dashboard to continuously verify behavior as part of your development process. If appropriate, configure your plugin so that it can return data.

  • If you scaffolded your plugin with a previous version of create-plugin, you can run a new command to add the missing provisioning files.