Publishing to the Marketplace

Once you have finished building and testing your extension locally, you can publish it to the Fleetbase Registry.

Publishing your extension makes it available in the Fleetbase Marketplace, allowing other users (or just other organizations within your own self-hosted instance) to discover and install it with a single click.

Prerequisites

Before you can publish an extension, you must ensure that:

1. Your extension has a valid extension.json manifest file.
2. Your extension's source code is hosted in a public Git repository (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket). The Registry needs to be able to clone the repository to build the extension.
3. You have an account on the Fleetbase Registry.

Authenticating with the CLI

To publish an extension, you must first authenticate the Fleetbase CLI with the Registry.

1. Open your terminal.
2. Run the login command:

flb login

3. The CLI will prompt you for your Registry credentials (email and password).

Once authenticated, the CLI will store a secure token locally, allowing you to run subsequent commands without logging in again.

Publishing the Extension

To publish your extension, navigate to the root directory of your extension (where the extension.json file is located) and run the publish command.

cd my-extension
flb publish

The CLI will perform the following steps:

1. Validate the Manifest: It will check your extension.json file to ensure all required fields (name, version, author, etc.) are present and correctly formatted.
2. Check for Existing Versions: It will check the Registry to see if an extension with the same name and version already exists. If it does, the publish will fail. You must increment the version number in extension.json before publishing an update.
3. Upload the Manifest: It will send the manifest data to the Registry.
4. Trigger a Build: The Registry will queue a background job to clone your Git repository, build the frontend engine, and package the backend code.

The Build Process

When you publish an extension, the Registry does not upload your local files directly. Instead, it pulls the code from your Git repository.

This ensures that the published extension is built in a clean, standardized environment and that the source code is always available for auditing.

The build process typically takes a few minutes. You can check the status of your extension in the Fleetbase Console by navigating to Extensions > My Published Extensions.

Updating an Extension

To publish a new version of your extension:

1. Commit your changes and push them to your Git repository.
2. Update the version field in your extension.json file (e.g., from 1.0.0 to 1.0.1).
3. Run flb publish again.

The Registry will pull the latest code, build the new version, and make it available as an update to users who have already installed the extension.