grafana/docs/sources/shared/tutorials/set-up-environment.md

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Set up Environment

Before you can get started building plugins, you need to set up your environment for plugin development.

To discover plugins, Grafana scans a plugin directory, the location of which depends on your operating system.

1. Create a directory called grafana-plugins in your preferred workspace.

2. Find the plugins property in the Grafana configuration file and set the plugins property to the path of your grafana-plugins directory. Refer to the Grafana configuration documentation for more information.

   [paths]
   plugins = "/path/to/grafana-plugins"
   

3. Restart Grafana if it's already running, to load the new configuration.

Alternative method: Docker

If you don't want to install Grafana on your local machine, you can use Docker.

To set up Grafana for plugin development using Docker, run the following command:

docker run -d -p 3000:3000 -v "$(pwd)"/grafana-plugins:/var/lib/grafana/plugins --name=grafana grafana/grafana:7.0.0

Since Grafana only loads plugins on start-up, you need to restart the container whenever you add or remove a plugin.

docker restart grafana