How To Use a Capacitor Plugin

Ionic Portals uses Capacitor under the hood, meaning that you can use Capacitor Plugins in your Portals. This means you can take advantage of our suite of Capacitor Core Plugins in your Portals, as well as any plugins made by the community. These plugins allow Portals to use native functionality with minimal configuration by the native developer or the web developer.

Core Plugins

Capacitor Core Plugins are plugins built by the Capacitor team and provided for you to use conveniently through public repositories.

React Native Usage

Follow the Android instructions and the iOS instructions in your native applications. When creating your portal, you will need to specify the android classpath and iOS Objective-C class name for the plugin class you intend to use:

const cameraPortal = {
  name: "camera",
  plugins: [
    {
      androidClassPath: "com.capacitorjs.plugins.camera.CameraPlugin",
      iosClassName: "CAPCameraPlugin"
    }
  ]
};

Published Plugins

In CocoaPods, the Capacitor plugins are prepended with Capacitor. For example, the @capacitor/storage plugin on npm is named CapacitorStorage on CocoaPods. The following Plugins are available in CocoaPods.

CapacitorActionSheet

The Action Sheet API provides access to native Action Sheets, which come up from the bottom of the screen and display actions a user can take.

CappacitorApp

The App API handles high level App state and events. For example, this API emits events when the app enters and leaves the foreground, handles deeplinks, opens other apps, and manages persisted plugin state.

CapacitorAppLauncher

The AppLauncher API allows to open other apps

CapacitorBrowser

The Browser API provides the capability to open an in-app browser and subscribe to browser events.

CapacitorCamera

The Camera API provides the capability to take a photo with the camera or to choose photos from the photo album.

CapacitorClipboard

The Clipboard API enables copy and pasting to/from the system clipboard.

CapacitorDevice

The Device API exposes internal information about the device, such as the model and operating system version, along with user information such as unique ids.

CapacitorDialog

The Dialog API provides methods for triggering native dialog windows for alerts, confirmations, and input prompts.

CapacitorFilesystem

The Filesystem API provides a NodeJS-like API for working with files on the device.

CapacitorGeolocation

The Geolocation API provides simple methods for getting and tracking the current position of the device using GPS, along with altitude, heading, and speed information if available.

CapacitorHaptics

The Haptics API provides physical feedback to the user through touch or vibration.

CapacitorKeyboard

The Keyboard API provides keyboard display and visibility control, along with event tracking when the keyboard shows and hides.

CapacitorLocalNotifications

The Local Notifications API provides a way to schedule device notifications locally (i.e. without a server sending push notifications).

CapacitorMotion

The Motion API tracks accelerometer and device orientation (compass heading, etc.)

CapacitorNetwork

The Network API provides network and connectivity information.

CapacitorPushNotifications

The Push Notifications API provides access to native push notifications.

CapacitorScreenReader

The Screen Reader API provides access to TalkBack/VoiceOver/etc. and provides simple text-to-speech capabilities for visual accessibility.

CapacitorShare

The Share API provides methods for sharing content to any sharing-enabled apps that the user may have installed.

CapacitorSplashScreen

The Splash Screen API provides methods for showing or hiding a Splash image.

CapacitorStatusBar

The StatusBar API Provides methods for configuring the style of the Status Bar, along with showing or hiding it.

CapacitorStorage

The Storage API provides a simple key/value persistent store for lightweight data.

CapacitorTextZoom

The Text Zoom API provides the ability to change Web View text size for visual accessibility.

CapacitorToast

The Toast API provides a notification pop up for displaying important information to a user. Just like real toast!

Web Usage

Web Developers need to install the web dependencies of the plugins from npm. The packages are listed under the @capacitor scope. To install a plugin, run npm i @capacitor/<plugin_name> from the root of your web project.

warning

To avoid errors, make sure that the versions in your Podfile, build.gradle, and package.json all match!

For more information on how to use Capacitor Plugins in your web application, check out the Capacitor Plugin docs.

Other Plugins

Any plugin built for Capacitor can be linked in to a project using Portals even if it is not available through public native repositories like the core plugins are.

Download the Plugin

Get the source code for the plugin and integrate it into your web app. If it is a Capacitor plugin, it is likely that it will be available through NPM.

npm i @capacitor-community/stripe

Link the Plugin Natively

The native code from the plugin needs to be made available to each native project using Portals.

iOS

In your project Podfile, define the path to the folder containing the plugin's Podspec file.

pod 'CapacitorPluginName', :path => '../../webapp/node_modules/@custom-capacitor/plugin'

The path to the Podspec file is typically the source root of the plugin project, not in the platform specific subfolder.

Android

In your project settings.gradle file, define a path to the plugin android native project code.

include ':capacitor-plugin-name'
project(':capacitor-plugin-name').projectDir = new File('../../webapp/node_modules/@custom-capacitor/plugin/android')

Then in your project module level build.gradle file, add the project to the dependencies.

dependencies {
    implementation project(':capacitor-plugin-name')
    implementation 'io.ionic:portals:0.5.0'

    //...
}

If successful, you should now see a section in the Android Studio project browser for your plugin, be able to browse its source code, and reference classes in the plugin within your native application source code.

Register the Plugin

iOS

Plugins are automatically registered on iOS.

Android

Register the plugin with a portal to use it.

Kotlin

class MyApplication : Application() {
    override fun onCreate(): Unit {
        super.onCreate()
        PortalManager.register("YOUR_PORTALS_KEY")

        val portalId = "MY_FIRST_PORTAL"
        PortalManager.newPortal(portalId)
                     .addPlugin(MyCapacitorPlugin::class.java)
                     .create()
    }
}

Java

public class MyApplication extends Application {
    @Override
    public void onCreate() {
        super.onCreate();
        PortalManager.register("YOUR_PORTALS_KEY");

        String portalId = "MY_FIRST_PORTAL";
        PortalManager.newPortal(portalId)
                     .addPlugin(MyCapacitorPlugin.class)
                     .create();
    }
}