Build your own extension

Why build your own extension?

There are two main reasons why you would want to build your own extension.

1. Many Awell customers develop and maintain proprietary apps (patient app, care team portal, even home grown EHRs) as part of their tech stacks. By building a private extension, you can allow your non-engineer users to build care flows that drive actions in those apps with our no-code builder.
2. You're a vendor of a tool that is used by care providers and would like to build a public extension that is featured on our Marketplace so any Awell customer can build care flows that drive actions in your tool.

Github repository

Building an extension needs to be done via our awell-extensions repository. Check out the repository locally to start contributing and create your first extension! If you're building a private extension, use your private repository.

Open Github repository

Prerequisites

Before you can create your first extension, make sure you have the following prerequisites.

1. You are familiar with the Awell Platform and Awell Extensions.
2. You are familiar with Typescript.
3. You have familiarity with the terminal. You should know how to cd into a folder and run commands.
4. You have familiarity with Github and know how to contribute to an existing repository.
5. You have Node.js installed.
6. You have a text editor installed, such as Visual Studio Code, Atom, Sublime Text, or Vim. If you're not sure which editor to use, we recommend Visual Studio Code.

Node

The repository can run using Node.js versions below 20.6 (e.g., 20.5.1). Versions 20.6 and above will cause an error with ESLint.

Yarn

Note that we use yarn PnP which might require additional configuration in your IDE to work properly. You can follow the installation instructions below to get the repository running locally.

If you use a different IDE, check the yarn documentation for instructions on IDE setup.

Installation (VSCode)

Follow the steps below to set up the extensions repository locally on your machine:

1. Check out the repository locally
2. Install the ZipFS extension in VSCode
3. Explicitly set the Typescript version in VSCode:
   • Press ctrl+shift+p in a TypeScript file
   • Choose "Select TypeScript Version"
   • Pick "Use Workspace Version"

You can validate you have a working set up by running yarn test, yarn lint, and yarn build.