Creating the Plugin

Every plugin starts on the Plugin Dev screen. Open it from the Rogue Architect sidebar. It lists everything you can edit, grouped by ownership: the plugins you wrote, plus anything your team or the wider community shared with you.

Plugin Dev shows your plugins, your team’s plugins, official Rogue Labs plugins, and community-shared plugins in one searchable view.

From here you have two ways to create a new plugin.

Option A: Start Fresh

Click Add new Plugin at the top right. The editor opens with an empty YAML buffer, blank metadata, and no parameters. Use this option when:

• You’re writing something new that doesn’t resemble anything in the catalog.
• You want full control over every parameter, task, and default.
• You’d rather build up from nothing than trim down a copy.

Starting from a blank plugin is slow. The catalog almost always has a similar plugin you can fork, so most plugins don’t need to start from zero.

Option B: Clone an Existing Plugin

Find a published plugin that does something close to what you want, and clone it. The plugin category dropdown assigns each plugin one of six types. Browsing the catalog by category is the fastest way to find a starting point:

• action: workflow steps and machine-state changes (Auto-Log User, Set UI Performance Mode, Restart Windows Machine).
• role: server roles and AD topology (Domain Controller, Child DC, DNS Server, Add Users to Group).
• application: installers and configured software (Notepad++, VLC, Office, Visual Studio, browsers).
• vulnerability: planted weaknesses (kerberoastable accounts, weak ACLs, exposed credentials, misconfigurations).
• attack: offensive tooling for red-team boxes (Kali installers, C2 frameworks, redirectors, recon kits).
• defense: blue-team tooling (EDR/AV agents, log forwarders, SIEM components, monitoring stacks).

To clone, click a plugin you can access, then choose Clone to New Plugin from the Manage Plugin menu in the editor header. You get a new unpublished plugin with the current YAML, metadata, parameters, and Vault contents. Change one thing at a time, and run a test build between edits.

Cloning is faster for almost everything. A reference plugin already follows the patterns Rogue Arena expects (no playbook header, vault staging, validation tasks, idempotency guards). Starting from one puts you closer to a working plugin than starting blank.

After You’re In the Editor

Once the plugin opens, the rest of the work happens in three places:

• YAML editor in the middle, which holds the task list. See Updating the Ansible Code for the rules.
• Top-bar panels: Templates, Dependencies, Tag Parent Plugin, Automated Actions, Parameters, Addon Config Samples, and Resources. See Updating Metadata.
• Manage Plugin menu: Preview, Clone to New Plugin, Publish or Unpublish, Properties, Sharing, Ownership, and Delete. See Publishing and Sharing.