Plugin

🔋 ZModel vs Prisma Schema

ZenStack's "plugin" concept replaces PSL's "generator".

Plugin is a powerful mechanism that allows you to extend ZenStack at the schema, CLI, and runtime levels. This section only focuses on how to add plugins to your ZModel. Please refer to the Plugin Development section for more details on how to develop plugins.

Adding plugins to ZModel

Let's take a look at the following example:

plugin myPlugin {
    provider = 'my-zenstack-plugin'
    output = './generated'
}

info

In fact, the zen generate command is entirely implemented with plugins. The ZModel -> TypeScript generation is supported by the built-in @core/typescript plugin which runs automatically. You can explicitly declare it if you wish:

plugin typescript {
  provider = '@core/typescript'
  output = '../generated'
}

Please refer to the Plugin References for the full list of built-in plugins.

A plugin declaration involves three parts:

1. A unique name
2. A provider field that specifies where to load the plugin from. It can be a built-in plugin (like @core/prisma here), a local JavaScript module, or an NPM package name.
3. Plugin-specific configuration options, such as output in this case. Options are solely interpreted by the plugin implementation.

A plugin can have the following effects to ZModel:

• It can contribute custom attributes that you can use to annotate models and fields.
• It can contribute code generation logic that's executed when you run the zenstack generate command.

Plugins can also contribute to the ORM runtime behavior, and we'll leave it to the ORM part to explain it in detail.