Developing your own plugin

You can set up a development environment within the SDK and use it to create a plugin.

Before you begin

Ensure you have the Java SDK and Apache Ant installed.

The Java SDK, along with Apache Ant, enables you to create directories for your project and use the build script to build, clean, or deploy it.

Create a new project directory in the <pf_install>/pingfederate/sdk/plugin-src directory.
In the new project directory, create a subdirectory named java.

This is where you place the Java source code for your implementation. Follow standard Java package and directory structure layout.
If your project depends on third-party libraries, create another subdirectory called lib and place the necessary .jar files in it.
Edit the build.local.properties file and set target-plugin-name to specify the name of the directory that contains your project.
Run the appropriate target to clean, build, or deploy your plugin.

To display a list of available build targets, run ant from <pf_install>/pingfederate/sdk.
```
[java] Main targets:
[java]
[java] clean-plugin Clean the plug-in build directory
[java] deploy-plugin Deploy the plug-in jar and libs to PingFederate
[java] jar-plugin    Package the plug-in jar
[java]
[java] Default target: help
```
Because it packages the .jar files with additional metadata to make them discoverable by PingFederate, we recommend building the project with the build.xml file included in the SDK.