grafana/docs/sources/developers/plugins/_index.md

aliases	description	title	weight
../plugins/developing/	Resources for creating Grafana plugins	Plugin developer's guide	200

Grafana plugin developer's guide

You can extend Grafana's built-in capabilities with plugins. Plugins enable Grafana to accomplish specialized tasks, custom-tailored to your requirements. By making a plugin for your organization, you can connect Grafana to other data sources, ticketing tools, and CI/CD tooling.

You can create plugins for private use or contribute them to the open source community by publishing to the Grafana plugin catalog. This catalog has hundreds of other community and commercial plugins.

If you are a Grafana plugin developer or want to become one, this plugin developer's guide contains the tutorials and reference materials to help you get started.

Plugin basics

You can create several types of plugins, including:

• Panel plugins - Visualize data and navigate between dashboards.
• Data source plugins - Link to new databases or other sources of data.
• App plugins - Create rich applications for custom out-of-the-box experiences.

Note: To learn more about the types of plugins you can build, refer to the [Plugin management]({{< relref "../../administration/plugin-management" >}}) documentation.

Contents of this developer's guide

The following topics are covered in this guide:

• [Get started with plugins]({{< relref "./get-started-with-plugins" >}}) - Start developing Grafana plugins with the Create-plugin tool.
• [Introduction to plugin development]({{< relref "./introduction-to-plugin-development" >}}) - Learn the fundamentals of Grafana plugin development: frontend and backend development processes, data frames, error handling, and more.
• [Create a Grafana plugin]({{< relref "./create-a-grafana-plugin" >}}) - If you're familiar with plugin creation, use the tutorials for creating panel plugins, data source plugins, and more to deepen your knowledge.
• [Migrate a plugin]({{< relref "./migration-guide" >}}) - Learn how to upgrade from a previous version of a Grafana plugin, rewrite an old Angular plugin in React, or update to a newer version.
• [Publish a Grafana plugin]({{< relref "./publish-a-plugin" >}}) - Learn about publishing a plugin to the Grafana plugin catalog, including publishing criteria, packaging, and deployment.
• [Reference]({{< relref "metadata.md" >}}) - Description of the plugin.json schema and plugin metadata.

Go further

Learn more about additional tools and see plugin type examples.

User interface creation

Explore the many UI components in our Grafana UI library.

Plugin examples

Grafana Labs provides a number of best practice example plugins for different use cases to help you quickly get started. Browse our plugin examples.

SDK

Learn more about [Grafana Plugin SDK for Go]({{< relref "./backend/grafana-plugin-sdk-for-go" >}}).