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Paclet Development

Now that we know how a paclet should be structured, we can get into the details of developing a paclet. We'll make a paclet that has a bit of everything in it to see how it all works.

Directory Structure

Our basic structure will start out looking like

 
 MyPaclet 
  + PacletInfo.m

And the PacletInfo.m will look like:

 Paclet[
  Name        -> "MyPaclet",
  Version     -> "0.0.1",
  Creator     -> "b3m2a1 <b3m2a1@gmail.com>",
  Description -> "A sample paclet to show the paclet developement process"
  ]

Kernel and Main Package

The first thing we'll need to add to the paclet is a "Kernel" folder and a primary implementation package. For simplicity, we'll have our paclet provide a context "MyPaclet`" , and so our main package will have to create this context.

We'll change our structure to look like:

 
 MyPaclet 
  + PacletInfo.m 
  Kernel 
   + init.m 
  MyPaclet.m

And the info will look like:

 Paclet[
  Name        -> "MyPaclet",
  Version     -> "0.0.1",
  Creator     -> "b3m2a1 <b3m2a1@gmail.com>",
  Description -> "A sample paclet to show the paclet developement process",
  Extensions  -> {
  {"Kernel", "Root"->".", "Context"->{"MyPaclet`"}}
  }
  ]

Now we'll need to make the init.m file load MyPaclet.m , but this is no different than the standard way we might do this, e.g. via:

 <<MyPaclet`MyPaclet`

Any other packages we provide should then be loaded in turn via MyPaclet.m . We won't get into the details of how to write a paclet with interacting piceces here, as there are many different ways people like to do this and we're trying to take a high-level overview, but we will return to that theme later.

After we do this it's possible to load the paclet with

 <<MyPaclet`

FrontEnd Resources

Let's say we have some front-end resources we'd like to bundle with our paclet:

• A stylesheet called MyPacletStyles.nb
• An icon in MyPacletIconResource.png
• A helper palette in MyPacletHelper.nb

We'll add the following folder to our main directory:

 
  FrontEnd 
   StyleSheets 
    MyPaclet 
     + MyPacletStyles.nb 
   Palettes 
    MyPaclet 
     + MyPacletHelper.nb 
   SystemResources 
    Bitmaps 
     MyPaclet 
      + MyPacletIconResource.png

And the info will look like:

 Paclet[
  Name        -> "MyPaclet",
  Version     -> "0.0.1",
  Creator     -> "b3m2a1 <b3m2a1@gmail.com>",
  Description -> "A sample paclet to show the paclet developement process",
  Extensions  -> {
  {"Kernel", "Root"->".", "Context"->{"MyPaclet`"}},
  {"FrontEnd"}
  }
  ]

We can then link to this stylesheet by setting

 
StyleDefinitions->FrontEnd`FileName[{"MyPaclet"}, "MyPacletStyles.nb"]

Or if we want to use the paclet icon we can do so with the appropriate FrontEnd`FileName . This time we'll want FrontEnd`FileName[{"MyPaclet"}, "MyPacletIconResource.png"] . Here's an example of this:

 
RawBoxes@
  DynamicBox[
    FEPrivate`ImportImage@
      FrontEnd`FileName[{"MyPaclet"}, "MyPacletIconResource.png"]
    ]

Documentation

If we have some documentation pages we have either built with Workbench or any of a number of third-part interfaces ( here's mine ), we can add these to our package too. Assuming we have the following English-language documentation pages to add:

• A symbol page, MyPacletSym.nb
• A guide, MyPaclet.nb
• A tutorial, MyPacletOverview.nb

We'll add the following folder to our directory

 
  Documentation 
   English 
    ReferencePages 
     Symbols 
      + MyPacletSym.nb 
     Guides 
      + MyPaclet.nb 
     Tutorials 
      + MyPacletOverview.nb

And we'll add the following extension to the paclet info:

 {
  "Documentation", 
  "Language" -> "English",
  "MainPage" -> "Guides/MyPaclet",
  "LinkBase" -> "MyPaclet"
  }

After this is installed, when people search for MyPacletSym the page will appear.

Resources

Finally, let's say we want to bundle resources with our paclet, maybe we have a template notebook, MyTemplate.nb and a bunch of data stored in .mx files, MyDat1.mx , MyDat2.mx , and MyDat3.mx

We can add the following folder structure:

 
  Resources 
   + MyTemplate.nb 
   Data 
    + MyDat1.mx 
    + MyDat2.mx 
    + MyDat3.mx

And then add the extension:

 {
  "Resource", 
  "Resources" -> {
    {"Template", "MyTemplate.nb"},
    {"Data1", "Data/MyDat1.mx"},
    {"Data2", "Data/MyDat2.mx"},
    {"Data3", "Data/MyDat3.mx"}
    }
  }

Now we can use

 
PacletResource["MyPaclet", "Template"]

and we'll get the file path to the template notebook