Magnolia 5.5 reached end of life on November 15, 2019. This branch is no longer supported, see End-of-life policy.
A Magnolia light module is a file and folder-based module. It can define every Magnolia item which can be configured in YAML – such as apps, templates, dialogs, themes, and others. It can also contain a lightweight YAML-based module descriptor and web resources such as css and javascript files.
Light modules can be built with a simple text editor, with no special tools (such as Maven) required. A light module cannot incorporate java classes.
Example of light module structure:
magnolia.resources.dir/ └── <module-name>/ ├── apps/ ├── dialogs/ │ └── myDialog.yaml ├── module.yaml ├── webresources/ └── templates/ ├── components/ │ ├── myComponent.ftl │ └── myComponent.yaml └── pages/ ├── myPage.ftl ├── myPage.js └── myPage.yaml
Light modules can contain more or fewer folders compared to this example.
magnolia.resources.dir
Magnolia light modules must reside within the Magnolia resources directory; this directory is also often referred to as the Magnolia light modules folder. The name and the location of this directory are arbitrary, but you must provide the path to the folder via configuration.
magnolia.resources.dir
is a property defining the directory from which resources are loaded in a Magnolia instance. This directory is used for file-based resources such as light modules and for overriding classpath resources. The property is configured in WEB-INF/config/default/magnolia.properties
and has the default value $magnolia.home/modules
. To see the current value of the property, go to the Config Info tab in the About Magnolia app.
You can use symbolic links (a.k.a symlinks or soft links) in the resources directory to include light modules located elsewhere on your system.
The following items can be defined within a light module using YAML. Items defined by YAML can be decorated, or can be reused with YAML inherit and include.
Other non YAML-based items which can be in a light module:
Using the Magnolia CLI you can create the folder structure for a light module with the command create-light-module
. Open a shell, cd
to your light modules directory, and execute the following command:
mgnl create-light-module one-pager-module
é
, à
, ç
, ä
, ö
, ü
or special characters (e.g. slashes /
, \
and so on). The name must match the regular expression [a-zA-Z0-9-_]
.Note that this only works if you have installed Magnolia CLI, see Magnolia CLI Installation.