How to Debug Your Plugin
Bugs happen! In this tutorial, you will learn how to debug your Adobe XD plugin.
Prerequisite
At least one plugin in your develop
folder (you can create one using our Quick Start tutorial).
Debugging Steps
During development, if your plugin is misbehaving, there are few things you can do to investigate the problem.
1. Look for errors in the developer console
You can see error messages your plugin may be causing with the XD developer console.
The developer console can be opened from the Plugins menu: Plugins > Development > Developer Console.
2. Try reloading the plugins
You can reload all plugins in your develop
folder from the Plugins menu: Plugins > Development > Reload Plugins.
There's also a handy keyboard shortcut:
Platform | Keyboard shortcut |
---|---|
macOS | Shift-Cmd-R |
Windows | Ctrl-Shift-R |
If there are any errors blocking the plugin from loading, they will appear in the developer console on reload:

3. Try logging messages to the developer console
The example code below does not appear to be creating the "Hello!" text as expected.
Let's try adding a "start message" and an "end message" into sayHello()
to double-check that the code is starting and running all the way to the end:
function sayHello(selection) {
console.log("sayHello started!"); // log a message
const el = new Text();
el.text = "Hello!";
el.styleRanges = [
{
length: el.text.length,
fill: new Color("#FFFFFF")
}
];
selection.insertionParent.addChild(el);
el.moveInParentCoordinates(100, 100);
console.log("sayHello ran to the end!"); // log a message
}
Your console.log
messages will appear in the developer console:

It looks like the function is running... maybe there is another problem.

Oops, the fill color set by the plugin is #FFFFFF
, which is white: the same color as this artboard's background.
You can verify this with a console.log
message:
console.log("el fill color =" + el.fill); // OUTPUT HERE
Next Steps
Ready to learn more about XD plugins?
- Learn about plugin structure
- Follow along with our tutorials
- Browse the API references