If you are new to Cordova and about to learn to program your first mobile app. You might want to know how to install, remove or view plugins for your app. So why you do need a plugin? Plugins in cordova is considered as a component or a module created to be used to access Native API of your phone. For example if you need to access your phone camera, you will need a camera cordova plugin which is cordova-plugin-camera. There are heaps of available plugin created by developers, you just need to try and test them so it works according to your need.
Here are the list of commands you will learn on how to add, remove or view an existing plugin. Please note, you will require NodeJS in order to run those commands. To list available plugins available on your cordova mobile app, simply open a NodeJS command prompt and go to your mobile app project folder and type in the following command.
cordova plugin list
If you are using the latest Cordova, you can run this short command as well.
cordova plugins
To add a plugin into your cordova app, you can run the following command.
cordova plugin add plugin-name //example cordova plugin add cordova-plugin-whitelist
You can also install directly from github project if you want. You just need to pass the full path of the github url. See below example.
cordova plugin add https://github.com/apache/cordova-plugin-camera.git
To remove a plugin from your cordova app, you can run the following command.
cordova plugin remove cordova-plugin-camera