Guide for developing addons

[gossi]

Hey,

I'm in the midst of developing my first addon. When searching for resources that help you get the job done, it is mostly the section on https://ember-cli.com/extending/#developing-addons-and-blueprints that helps you get started... somehow. First, it is a bit chaotic, I must say. It could be a sectioned a bit better and probably included on ember guides instead of ember-cli documentation? Second, no all the information I'm looking for are on that guides (see last paragraph here)

Sections I could think of:

• Conceptions and conventions for addons (private vs public space although this is going away with module unification)
• Create an addon with ember-cli with the example of a simple component (x-button works quite nice)
• How to use the dummy app
• Testing
• Publishing / Deployment

Basically, that's mostly covered with the current docs but could be easier structured to increase the pleasure reading it. Since some texts seem like outdated, versioned docs can help to accurately document what works with current version of ember and what not. It feels like, not everything mentioned on my link above still works today.

Apart from that, what I'm missing are some more advanced topics here:

• If I consume an addon, I have some configuration for it from my app in ember-cli-build.js. How I - as an addon author - provide these options to my consumers and handle them on my side
• Given, that basically everybody is using sass or less (even for me as an addon author) how do I deal with it, when I want to use them in my addon (e.g. sass) and want both provide sass and css files to my consumers?
• How to deal with i18n? I would like to provide some locales with my addon and if they aren't provided, would let user provide their own strings. I would normally use ember-i18n in my app but for addon? What might be a wise strategy here?

Thanks

[jenweber]

Hey @gossi, thanks for writing up your thoughts! We've discussed some similar ideas in the past. I will bring it up at the next learning team meeting and get some feedback.

If we did move forward, is this something you'd be interested in helping with? The limiting factor is likely volunteer time.

Congrats on writing your first addon!

[jenweber]

Also I should add that if there are small changes that would help the cli docs be clearer, that might be a good first step to PR them there.

[gossi]

Thanks for bringing this up. Unfortunately I don't have time to help nor the required knowledge to write the docs... that's why I'm asking for them.

[jenweber]

Understood. Thanks for taking the time to write this up. It is helpful!