Support local plugins in theme

[universse]

I have a set of local plugins that I want to include for every site that I develop. As some of those are super simple plugins, moving each of them to its own package seems to be an overkill and adds unnecessary complexity (i.e managing and publishing etc...)

From #16128 I understand there's potentially some technical roadblock.

Is there a way around this?

[LekoArts]

Generally speaking we want our users to build small, re-usable themes but since this has come up multiple times now there is work done on that.

It'll be fixed by #15856

[universse]

Not sure if it's the same thing. I'm requesting for theme that can resolve its own local plugins. This way, I can publish this theme and share among projects.

On the other hand, the PR is to enable local theme that is exclusive to individual project.

[pieh]

Enabling this is relatively straight forward. I was thinking about enabling local plugins/themes in themes themselves (in the PR that @LekoArts linked) but it can introduce problems that we don't have sane way of handling right now - because local plugins are not managed by some global repository like npm there is possibility of conflicts, because main identifier we use is plugin name and 2 different themes can use 2 completely different plugins with the same name which will lead to unspecified behaviour.

I.e.

• theme-a has local plugin theme-helpers,
• theme-b has local plugin theme-helpers

those local plugins are specific to their themes, so what should happen if we try to shadow theme-helpers? I know you mention your want local plugins and not themes, but a theme is a plugin and there is no difference for gatsby core if it implement theme specific APIs or not (config files merging / shadowing)

[universse]

Ah okay. The distinction between theme and plugin was a little bit hazy for me but I got it now. Thanks so much for the clarification. Looking forward to it.

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