Welcome to the Stream Deck SDK — Designed to make creating plugins for Stream Deck easy, the Stream Deck SDK provides everything you need to connect and communicate with Stream Deck app, letting you focus on the fun stuff.

Creating Stream Deck plugins with Node.js requires Node.js v20. When installing Node.js, we recommended using a version manager such as nvm (macOS) or nvm-windows (Windows).

The Stream Deck CLI provides commands for creating, testing, and bundling your plugins, and is the easiest way to get started building for Stream Deck. You can also learn more about getting started in our documentation.

1. With Node.js installed, install the CLI.

npm install -g @elgato/cli@latest

2. Once installed, run the create command to initialize the creation wizard.

streamdeck create

After creating a plugin with streamdeck create you'll be provided with a local environment for building a plugin.

/
├── *.sdPlugin/
│   ├── bin/
│   ├── imgs/
│   ├── logs/
│   ├── ui/
│   │   └── increment-counter.html
│   └── manifest.json
├── src/
│   ├── actions/
│   │   └── increment-counter.ts
│   └── plugin.ts
├── package.json
├── rollup.config.mjs
└── tsconfig.json

The package.json provides two scripts for building the plugin.

• npm run build - builds the plugin.
• npm run watch - continuously watches for changes, and hot-reloads the plugin after build.

Actions are the star of the show and enable users to interact with your plugin. Actions are represented as classes that inherit from SingletonAction, enabling your plugin to receive events from Stream Deck, for example key down, dial rotate, etc.

The following is an example of an action that listens for the keyDown event, and then sets the title of the source action.

import { action, KeyDownEvent, SingletonAction } from "@elgato/streamdeck";

@action({ UUID: "com.elgato.hello-world.say-hello" })
export class SayHelloAction extends SingletonAction {
    /**
     * Listen for the key down event that occurs when a user presses
     * a Stream Deck button, and change the title of the action.
     */
    async onKeyDown(ev: KeyDownEvent) {
        await ev.action.setTitle("Hello world");
    }
}

Plugins can be debugged using any Node.js debugger, for example Visual Studio Code, Chrome, etc., and by default will have debugging enabled when created with the Stream Deck CLI streamdeck create command.

You can configure debugging within the manifest's Node.js configuration.

{
    // ...
    "Nodejs": {
        "Version": "20",
        "Debug": "enabled"
    }
}

There are four available options when configuring the Debug property within the manifest:

• "enabled" - the plugin will run with --inspect allowing debuggers to connect.
• "break" - the plugin will launch with --inspect-brk and will await a debugger attaching before running.
• string - a collection of CLI arguments supplied to the plugin.
• undefined - debugging is disabled.

When running the plugin in either debug mode "enabled" or "break", a random available port will be allocated to the debug listener each time the plugin launches. If you wish to listen on a specific port, the Debug value can be set to a string of CLI arguments, for example to listen on port 12345, the Debug value would be --inspect=127.0.0.1:12345.

• Making your first changes.
• Learn about key and dial actions.
• Understand your plugin's metadata within the manifest JSON file
• Bundle your plugin for distribution.
• Explore Stream Deck plugin samples