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Creating your first adapter

To get you started with writing an ioBroker adapter, we will create a simple adapter for getting the number of page views for ioBroker's German Wikipedia page.

First, run the adapter creator in a directory where you want to keep your ioBroker code.1 The creator will create a new subdirectory for your new adapter.

npx @iobroker/create-adapter

It is recommended to try creator with dummy data the first few times. For this getting started you can enter dummy data and select random options (play around) for the most questions. You can decide if you want to do Javascript or Typescript. The only important options to follow the rest of this getting started are:

  • Adapter (instead of Visualization)
  • JSON UI to the question about the framework for Admin UI.
  • yes to dev-server
  • yes to 'Would you like to automate new releases with one simple command?' (release script).

You can have a look at the folders and files created. It is a complete template of an ioBroker adapter. The most important file is main.js or src/main.ts where your code goes. The UI for controlling options of your adapter goes into admin. If you selected JSON UI before, you will find a admin/jsonConfig.json file there, which we will use to define a simple UI which is sufficient for most adapters.

Now move into your adapter dir and fire up dev-server: 

cd ioBroker.test
dev-server watch

It will run ioBroker, and you can access admin at http://localhost:8081

Continue to "Write adapter code"

  1. We suggest using a local directory and regularly push local changes to GitHub for backup and transport instead of relying on full directory synchronization (like Nextcloud, Dropbox, iCloud or similar), because they might break the git repository structure or dev-server or npm dependencies. ↩

Last update: November 30, 2023
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