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Help us test your plugin

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Providing the Grafana Plugins team with additional test configurations and environments isn't required as part of the plugin submission process, but will speed up the review process. For more details, refer to Plugin submission review.

Developers often ask us how long it takes to review a plugin for publishing to the Grafana plugin catalog. Although we can't give you an estimate, you can help us reduce cycle times.

The most time-consuming task when reviewing a plugin is creating suitable test configurations and environments so we can verify your plugin's behavior. This step often involves several back-and-forth conversations between you, the plugin developer, and us, the review team.

To help us test your plugin and improve the review time, you can add testing resources to your plugin via provisioning.

Why provision testing information?​

Providing testing context offers several benefits:

  • Faster review times. If you include provisioning information for your plugin before submission, your wait for the review is much shorter.
  • Easier reviews. An out-of-the-box working example allows us to easily experiment with additions to the plugin.
  • Easier setup for e2e tests. Provisioned dashboards allow e2e tests to run against specific scenarios across local development and in CI.
  • Improved clarity. Provisioned plugins make it easier for tech-savvy users to understand how the plugin works.

What do we need?​

Depending on the type and complexity of your plugin, we require the following resources to test your plugin:

  • A simple test JSON dashboard for simple panel or data source plugins.
  • A docker-compose.yml file with all the configuration necessary to have the plugin running.
  • For more complex plugins, we could require access to a test API to thoroughly try out your plugin.

How to provide test configurations and environments​

Provisioning allows you to add resources in a YAML file under a /provisioning directory. We can then use those files to test your plugin as you intended it to work, and provide a better and faster review.

Starting in v2.8.0, create-plugin generates provisioning capabilities for all plugin types (apps, datasources and panels) and includes a sample dashboard. If you scaffolded your plugin with a previous version of create-plugin, you can run a new command to add the missing provisioning files.

What you need to do​

Provision your plugin with the required testing files and setup that can run from scratch without additional manual commands or configuration.

For example:

  • Create an example dashboard with your working plugin, export it as a JSON, and put it in your provisioning files. This is required for panel and data source plugins.

    • If necessary, create a provisioning file for the data source associated with the dashboard.

  • Prepare a docker-compose.yml file with all the necessary services set up to use the plugin.

    • For example, a data source plugin often requires a service that provides the data and some seed data.
    • Running Docker compose up from a fresh environment should be enough to make the dashboard example work.

  • 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.