Capacitor Plugin APIs

Capacitor includes a number of native plugin APIs that are available to all Capacitor apps. These can be thought of as Capacitor “core plugins,” and they make it easy to access commonly needed functionality on each platform.

For those coming from Cordova, the core Capacitor plugins cover much of the core Cordova plugins, and also include some new ones.

See the Plugins list on the left menu for the full list of available plugins.

API Usage

To use a Capacitor plugin, follow these steps:

1) Import the Plugins object. It represents the registry of all Capacitor plugins.

import { Plugins } from '@capacitor/core';

2) Get a plugin from the Plugin Registry (Plugins object).

const { Browser } = Plugins;

3) Use the plugin API:

async openBrowser() {
  // On iOS, for example, open the URL in SFSafariViewController (the in-app browser)
  await Browser.open({ url: "https://ionicframework.com" });
}

A common mistake is to import a plugin directly, then use the plugin API immediately, resulting in the web implementation being used:

import { Browser } from '@capacitor/core';

async openBrowser() {
  // On iOS, for example, this will open the URL in Safari instead of
  // the SFSafariViewController (in-app browser)
  await Browser.open({ url: "https://ionicframework.com" });
}

By using the plugins from the plugin registry (Plugins object), the native implementation of the plugin is used (if available), with fallback to the web version.

Angular Notes

Capacitor plugin event listeners run outside of Angular’s NgZone execution context. Contain handler logic within an NgZone.run block to ensure Angular’s change detection is triggered:

constructor(private ngZone: NgZone) { }

async ngOnInit() {
  Network.addListener("networkStatusChange", (status) => {
    this.ngZone.run(() => {
      // This code will run in Angular's execution context
      this.networkStatus = status.connected ? "Online" : "Offline";
    });
  });
}