manifest-plus

The Manifest+ specification is an unofficial community developed extension to the official Foundry VTT manifest specification for module and system development intended to add additional data which can be used by packages within Foundry VTT and by external applications.

This specification is developed by The League of Extraordinary Foundry Developers. The core Foundry VTT software simply ignores these additional manifest fields. A number of external applications including The Bazaar package browser on The Forge and Foundry Hub use this extended data to give the general public a rich experience by adding cover images, icons, enhanced contact details, and more.

Package Manifest Standard Fields

The Foundry VTT manifest contains a number of required and optional fields which act as metadata for your package. The official fields are documented in the core documentation for modules and systems respectively:

• Introduction to Module Development
• Introduction to System Development

Manifest+ does not replace the standard manifest, but enhances it. Most of the fields added do not touch any of the core attributes at all except the authors field.

Authors

The core Foundry VTT manifest specification has two ways of defining the package author; either through the author field which expects a simple string or the more complex authors field. We highly recommend including the authors field in your package as it provides much more flexibility.

Currently, while authors is a part of the standard manifest Foundry VTT does not actually utilize this field, so you should also include the author field until such a time as that changes. {.is-info}

The authors field is an array of objects with each object providing information about one of the authors of the package. This could be one author or many. The standard version includes name, url, and email fields. Only name is required.

For Manifest+ we want to recognize that a personal website and email address are not necessarily the best or only ways to contact the author. To that end, we introduce discord, ko-fi, patreon, reddit, and twitter fields as well.

"author": "Name of the author",
"authors": [
  {
    "name": "Name of the author",
    "url": "https://website.com/of/the/author",
    "email": "email@example.com",
    "discord": "discordID#0001",
    "ko-fi": "kofiName",    
    "patreon": "patreonName",
    "reddit": "u/RedditUsername",
    "twitter": "@TwitterHandle",
  }
]

Each of these additional fields follow the naming convention of the platform. For example with Twitter handles the @TwitterHandle format is used.

Manifest+

All Manifest+ fields are optional, but they are all useful. We recommend including as many of these fields as reasonable in order to provide enriched metadata for your package.

Version

Document Version: 1.2.0

It is recommended to include a manifestPlusVersion field in your manifest to denote which version of Manifest+ you have implemented. Breaking changes are not intended for this specification, but if they do occur the major version will be incremented in accordance with semantic versioning.

"manifestPlusVersion": "1.2.0"

Media

One of the largest additions, the media field, is an array of objects that each provide data for a single multimedia item. This data includes a type field which indicates what kind of media is being provided as well as an url field which provides the address of the media resource. An optional caption field is available to describe your multimedia item.

"media": [
  {
    "type": "screenshot",
    "url": "link/to/media/file",
    "caption": "<Insert description of screenshot>"
  },
  {
    "type": "cover",
    "url": "https://somereposite.com/author/repo/raw/images/cover.png",
    "caption": "<Insert module / system name>"
  },
  {
    "type": "video",
    "url": "https://somereposite.com/author/repo/raw/videos/demo.webm",
    "loop": true,
    "thumbnail": "https://somereposite.com/author/repo/raw/images/thumb.png",
    "caption": "<Insert description of a cool feature from the video>"
  }
]

Media Types

The following type of media are defined by the Manifest+ specification:

• cover - A cover image which is intended to be displayed along with the package description.
• icon - A small image icon such as a logo or author avatar.
• screenshot - An image of the package in action.
• video - A video file which can be played, or the URL of an embeddable video (such as Youtube or Vimeo)
  • loop - Optional field specific to video media. If loop is set to true, the video is expected to be treated as an animated image, like a GIF (i.e. muted and looped).
  • thumbnail - Optional URL to provide a video thumbnail.

Media Recommendations

There is no guarantee how the media files will be used, but these are the recommended dimensions and known existing usages.

Caption

Every media type accepts an optional caption field that can be used to describe what the media shows. It is up to the consumer of the Manifest+ specification to determine how it is used. The caption could be used as an alt image tag or as an actual caption below the media type itself.

Cover

Avoid putting large text on the cover image as it should showcase the package rather than the name of the package.

• Width: 1280px
• Aspect Ratio: 2:1

This is currently used on the Forge’s Bazaar.

Icon

• Width: 512px
• Aspect Ratio: 1:1

Fallback on the Bazaar if cover is not defined.

Screenshot

Anything that should go into an <img> HTML element: .png, .gif, .webp. Try to keep the file size under 1MB, definitely no more than 10MB. Gifs in particular will probably need to be larger, but know that the larger the image the longer it will take to load.

Video

Anything that should go into an <video> HTML element: .mp4, .webm.

Additionally, some Manifest+ consumers may supported embedding video from common providers like YouTube and Vimeo. The address of the video can be provided in the url field. Consumers should take care to parse this field appropriately to avoid loading a YouTube video in a <video> element or an .mp4 in a YouTube embed.

Video Thumbnail

Should be a static image.

• Dimensions: 1280px by 720px

Library

The library field is a boolean that indicates whether the package is a library intended for other packages to depend on and consume. This field should be true if your package does not present any user-facing features, but rather provides functionality for other packages to utilize and rely upon. Packages with this field set to true may be hidden from third party package lists to avoid confusing users.

	"library": true,

When omitted the default value of this field is false. It is not necessary to explicitly set this value unless it needs to be true.

The library key might be coming to Foundry Core in 0.8.x. Issue on Gitlab. {.is-info}

Includes

This field is intended to allow developers to create improved deployment tools. The includes field is an array of strings where each string is a relative file path that should be included in the package zip archive. Special CI / CD tools can use this field along with the official fields for scripts, languages, and styles to generate the archive with only the desired files without needing to create an additional configuration file.

"includes": [
   "relative/path/to/files/script.js", 
   "relative/path/to/templates/template.html", 
   "path/to/image/assets/folder"
]

Deprecated

This field is intended to be added to the manifest of a package that is no longer being maintained and / or is no longer functional / useful. This may be because the author created a new better alternative, or the features are integrated into the Foundry VTT core software, or an associated system assumes the same functionality. Perhaps you as the author have abandoned the package and no longer intend to keep it up to date.

The deprecated field is an object which contains a number of fields explaining the nature of the deprecation status.

Fields

• coreVersion - If set the package is assumed to be a module that has been deprecated by a Foundry VTT core update. This field is the core version number as a string.
• reason - A human-readable string explaining why the package was deprecated.
• alternatives - An array of objects each providing data about another package which could act as a replacement for deprecated package.
  • alternatives.name - The name of the alternative package.
  • alternatives.manifest - The URL of the manifest file for the alternative package from which it can be downloaded.

"deprecated": {
  "coreVersion": "0.7.0",
  "reason": "This was added to foundry core.",
  "alternatives": [
    {
      "name": "module-name",
      "manifest": "https://link.com/to/module.json"
    }
  ]
}

Conflicts

The conflicts field is similar to the dependencies field in the core Foundry VTT manifest specification, but provides a mapping of packages which can not interoperate with the given package. It is an array of objects which define one or more packages that may pose conflicts. Each conflict object has a name field which matches the name of the other package, and a type which is the type of the other package. Additionally, the optional versionMin and versionMax fields can be used to define a range of version numbers for the other package within which the conflict occurs.

"conflicts": [
  {
    "name": "module-name",
    "type": "module",
    "versionMin": "a.b.c",
    "versionMax": "a.c.d"
  }
]

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