Publish a plugin

Publish a plugin to make it available to the public or just your team and take advantage of Sketch’s plugin update mechanism. To let others know about your plugin submit to the official listing on the Sketch website.

For automatic updates to work a plugin must be downloadable and available versions must be provided via an updating JSON file. Sketch regularly checks for updates and prompts the user to install a new plugin version when it becomes available.

1. Submit manually

  1. Create an updating JSON file and upload it to a server.
  2. Set the appcast property in the plugin manifest to the URL of the updating JSON file.
  3. Create a ZIP archive of the plugin bundle, e.g. select-shapes.sketchplugin › select-shapes.sketchplugin.zip.
  4. Upload the archive to a location where it can be downloaded from.
  5. Fill in the updating JSON file with the correct information. 
    {
  "itemName" : "Select Shapes Sketch Plugin",
  "versionID" : "1.0.0",
  "downloadURL" : "https://selectshapes.com/select-shapes.sketchplugin.zip",
  "downloadFileSize" : 68487516,
  "creationDate" : "Wed, 31 May 2023 14:00:00 +0000",
}
  6. To include the plugin in the official listing, open a pull request on plugin-directory providing information about your plugin including the URL to the updating JSON file.

Note: The only two required properties of the updating JSON file are downloadURL and versionID.

2. Use Sketch Plugin Manager skpm

Sketch Plugin Manager skpm

If your plugin is hosted on GitHub, skpm allows to manage releases and submission to the plugin listing from the command-line automating the following steps:

  1. Create a downloadable ZIP archive.
  2. Create a GitHub release.
  3. Add or update an .appcast.xml with the latest release information to the repository.
  4. Open a pull request on plugin-directory to include the plugin in the official listing.

Run skpm from your plugin folder.

skpm publish

For all options such as not including a plugin in the official listing view the usage instructions.

skpm publish --help

Note: If you haven’t used skpm with your GitHub repository before you’ll need to login from the command-line first using a Personal Access Token granting access to the repo scope.

skpm login

–

Note: skpm is no longer supported and updated. skpm generates the previously used RSS/XML appcast file for updating plugins. This format has been replaced in Sketch 97 with the updating JSON file. Sketch 97 includes a converter from the RSS/XML format and will continue to work with the previous format.

Next steps

Read more about how to update an existing plugin.