Table of Contents

Hello World Plugin

How to write your first plugin for CounterStrikeSharp

Creating a New Project

First, ensure you have the relevant .NET 8.0 SDK for your platform installed on your machine. You can find the links to the latest downloads on the official Microsoft download page.

Creating a Class Library

All CounterStrikeSharp plugins are installed on the server as built .dll class library binary files, so we will get started by creating a new class library using the inbuilt dotnet sdk tools.

dotnet new classlib --name HelloWorldPlugin

Use your IDE (Visual Studio/Rider) to add a reference to the CounterStrikeSharp.Api.dll file that is installed onto the server. If you are using VSCode or a text editor, you can edit the .csproj file directly and add the following:

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <TargetFramework>net8.0</TargetFramework>
    <ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>
    <Nullable>enable</Nullable>
  </PropertyGroup>

+  <ItemGroup>
+    <Reference Include="CounterStrikeSharp.API">
+       <HintPath>[where you downloaded or installed]/addons/counterstrikesharp/api/CounterStrikeSharp.API.dll</HintPath>
+    </Reference>
+  </ItemGroup>
</Project>
Tip

Instead of manually adding a reference to CounterStrikeSharp.Api.dll, you can > install the NuGet package CounterStrikeSharp.Api using the following:

dotnet add package CounterStrikeSharp.API

Creating a Plugin File

Rename the default class file that came with your new project (by default it should be Class1.cs) to something more accurate, like HelloWorldPlugin.cs. Inside this file, we will insert the stub hello world plugin. Be sure to change the name and namespace so it matches your project name.

using CounterStrikeSharp.API.Core;

namespace HelloWorldPlugin;
public class HelloWorldPlugin : BasePlugin
{
    public override string ModuleName => "Hello World Plugin";

    public override string ModuleVersion => "0.0.1";

    public override void Load(bool hotReload)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
    }
}

Now build your project using your ide or the dotnet build command. You should now have a built binary file in your bin/Debug/net8.0 subdirectory in the project.

Installing your Plugin

Locate the plugins folder in your CS2 dedicated server (/game/csgo/addons/counterstrikesharp/plugins) and create a new folder with the exact same name as your output .dll file. In this example it would be HelloWorldPlugin.dll, so I will make a new folder called HelloWorldPlugin. Inside of this folder, copy and paste the: HelloWorldPlugin.deps.json, HelloWorldPlugin.dll, and HelloWorldPlugin.pdb files. Once completed, the folder should look as follows:

.
└── HelloWorldPlugin
    ├── HelloWorldPlugin.deps.json
    ├── HelloWorldPlugin.dll
    └── HelloWorldPlugin.pdb
Caution

If you have installed external nuget packages for your plugin, you may need to include their respective .dlls. For example, if you utilize the Stateless C# library, include stateless.dll in your HelloWorld plugin directory.

Note

Note that some of these dependencies may change depending on the version of CounterStrikeSharp being used.

Start the Server

Now start your CS2 dedicated server. Just before the CounterStrikeSharp.API Loaded Successfully. message you should see your Hello World! console write that we called from the load function, neat!

Note

By default, CounterStrikeSharp will automatically hot reload your plugin if you replace the .dll file in your plugin folder. When it does so, it will call the Unload and Load functions respectively, with the hotReload flag set to true.

It is worth noting that the framework will automatically deregister any event handlers or listeners for you automatically, so you can safely reregister these on load without checking this flag. However you may want to do some specific actions on a hot reload, which you can do in your Load() call by checking the flag!

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