Installing plugins

Thanks to our developer community, the Kirby ecosystem has a large number of free and paid plugins, that extend the functionality of Kirby. There are also several official Kirby plugins maintained by the Kirby team.

Once you have found one or more plugins that meet your needs, you will need to install them. Some plugins also require additional configuration options or some setup. All this information can be found in the documentation of the respective plugin.

There are usually four ways to install a plugin, which we will briefly describe here.

Download the plugin via the download link and unzip. Then put the unzipped folder into the /site/plugins/ folder of your Kirby project. If the plugins folder does not exist yet, create it first. The resulting folder structure should look like this:

site
- plugins
  - pluginname
    composer.json
    index.php
    index.js
    README.md
    …

There may be more files and folders in the downloaded plugin folder, or some of the files/folders may not be present, it depends on the plugin.

If you use Git to version control your project, you can install plugins that are available from an online service like GitHub as a Git submodule:

git submodule add https://github.com/developername/plugin-name.git site/plugins/plugin-name

Many Kirby plugins also support installation via Composer, which must be installed on your system. This installation method works best if your project is managed via Composer as well. Then you can run the following command from the root of your project:

composer require developername/pluginname

This will automatically add the plugin to your composer.json and install the plugin in the /site/plugins folder.

The Kirby CLI helps you to simplify common tasks with your Kirby installations. It also has a command to download and install plugins from a Git repo link:

kirby plugin:install https://github.com/developername/plugin-name.git

Note that some plugins may not support all installation types, so always consult their documentation. This may apply in particular to some paid plugins that are not publicly available and for which you may only receive a download link after purchase.