page_title: Plugin guide page_description: Plugin guide for Grafana
!Plugin support for panels is only available in nightly!
Adding support for all datasources and suggested panels would bloat grafana and make it impossible to maintain. That's why we implemented a plugin system that makes it possible for anyone to develop support for a datasource or custom panel without adding it to Grafana itself.
Installing a plugin is very simple. Just download it and place it in the Grafana plugins folder and restart grafana.
The default plugin folder is configurable under paths.plugins
It's also possible to add one specific plugin by linking to its folder.
[plugin.mirror]
path = /home/evil-queen/datasource-plugin-mirror
Each plugin is defined in plugin.json file in the plugin folder.
Instead of massive documentation about how it works we created a reference implementation of a plugin. You can find each reference implementation further down on this page.
Datasource have three responsibilities.
https://github.com/grafana/datasource-plugin-genericdatasource
Panel plugins are responsible for
We currently dont have a reference implementation for panel plugins but you can checkout https://github.com/grafana/panel-plugin-piechart