Stash plugin tutorial: tag list plugin

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It’s that time of year again! Time for Atlassian’s San Francisco office to be insanely jealous of our counterparts down under. Specifically, we’re jealous of the Sydney office’s graduate program: the Atlassian HackHouse.

For comparison, here’s what the San Francisco office looks like during Australia’s summer:

However, one awesome thing did shake out of this year’s HackHouse that benefits everybody, no matter which hemisphere you live in! A member of the Stash development team wrote a neat Stash plugin tutorial for our grads to hack on. Presumably between mojitos.

The Stash Tag List Plugin is a self-contained Bitbucket repository that iteratively teaches you how to build a fully functional Stash plugin. In five simple steps you’ll build a properly styled repository view that displays a list of tags in a Stash repository.

tag list repository view

The tutorial teaches you a range of useful plugin development skills, including:

  • An understanding of basic Atlassian plugin anatomy
  • Using the SDK to build and deploy your plugin
  • Registering servlets to build new Stash views
  • Importing services and extracting data from the Stash Java API
  • Constructing layout using Google Closure (Soy) Templates
  • Binding javascript and other web resources to your views

To get started, you’ll need a recent JDK and the Atlassian SDK installed. Then you can simply clone the repository from Bitbucket and start from the README.md!

If you’re more of a visual learner, you can also check out this screencast that teaches you how to build, deploy, and debug a Stash plugin from scratch in 30 minutes.

If you have any questions about Stash plugin development, leave a comment below or drop me a line on Twitter (I’m @kannonboy).