PF4J : Packaging

After you developed and tested your plugin you should packaging and releasing.
Currently, PF4J supports builtin two types of packaging

fat/shade/one-jar file (.jar)
zip file with lib and classes directories (.zip)

The first versions of PF4J came by default only with support for .zip format.
To install a plugin in your application you need to add it to plugins (pluginsRoot) directory. Your content of plugins directory can look like:

$ tree plugins
plugins
├── disabled.txt
├── enabled.txt
├── demo-plugin1-2.4.0.zip
└── demo-plugin2-2.4.0.zip

$ tree plugins
plugins
├── disabled.txt
├── enabled.txt
├── demo-plugin1-2.4.0.jar
└── demo-plugin2-2.4.0.jar

if you use .jar plugin packaging format.

If you want, you can mix multiple packaging format. For example, by default, you can mix .jar plugins with .zip plugins:

$ tree plugins
plugins
├── disabled.txt
├── enabled.txt
├── demo-plugin1-2.4.0.jar
└── demo-plugin2-2.4.0.zip

I recommend you to use .jar because is most simple and is a standard format in Java.

All plugins are loaded by PluginManager from plugins directory.
You can specify other location using pf4j.pluginsDir system property (-Dpf4j.pluginsDir=plugins) or programmatically when you create DefaultPluginManager.

PF4J Plugin Framework for Java

Packaging