Allow architect plugins to be unloaded and loaded at runtime

[janjongboom]

At the moment an architect application is 'set'. It gets created and then it cannot be modified. However, there might be cases where you'd want to load extra plugins, or unload others while running an application without destroying it. By exposing registerPlugin on the app prototype this gets enabled. The code to use this:

// create normal architect app
var architect = require("architect-git");
var config = architect.loadConfig(__dirname + "/config.js");
architect.createApp(config, function (err, app) {
        // some extra plugins to be loaded
        var plugins = [{packagePath: './some-extra-plugin'}];
        architect.resolveConfig(plugins, __dirname, function(err, resolved) {
            if (err) {
                return console.error('Resolve config failed', resolved);
            }
            app.loadPlugins(resolved, function() {
                return console.log('Registered plugins', app.config);
            });
        });
});

Or to unload an existing plugin:

var plugin = app.config.filter(function(c) {
     return c.packagePath === 'something' && c.bla === 'zus';
})[0];
plugin.destroy()

The plugin can implement onDestroy() to unregister express handlers or whatever.

[mattpardee]

Insane that I came to this repo today to see if this had been added in, and by chance I get this. Mr. Jongboom, my hat is tipped.

[janjongboom]

[mattpardee]

:shipit:

[SamyPesse]

Great, exactly what I needed :) Thanks a lot, is it working yet?

[janjongboom]

Yeah, I use it in a project and haven't found any issues with it.

[SamyPesse]

Thank you, but I build and started using an other plugins system compatible with architect with a cleaner code base: https://github.com/FriendCode/engineer

[sergi]

Any chance this will be reviewed soon? This would be quite a cool addition.

...or are there philosophical reasons not to accept it?

[janjongboom]

/cc @fjakobs

[creationix]

I have no philosophical reasons against it fwiw.

[mattpardee]

:shipit:!

[bmatusiak]

add "onLoad" construction too :grin:

[fjakobs]

Looks good to me. I have no political reasons to not accept it either. Usually I'd ask for unit tests but since the rest of architect doesn't have them, I'd regard that optional.

Unless you are so kind to add mocha based unit tests and make npm test work :)

[janjongboom]

Just merge it :p

[leeroybrun]

Great feature ! Is there a way to get the "app" object inside plugins ? I would like to load some submodules from one main module.

I'm searching a way to do this :

var architect = require('architect');

function setup(options, imports, register) {
    var config = imports.config;

    // How to get the app object from a plugin ?
    var app = imports.app; // ??

    architect.resolveConfig(config.plugins, __dirname, function(err, resolved) {
        if (err) {
            return console.error('Resolve config failed', resolved);
        }

        app.loadPlugins(resolved, function() {
            console.log('Registered plugins', app.config);

            register(null);
        });
    });
}

module.exports = setup;

[janjongboom]

I do it like this. Add an init() function to the plugin that you want to pass the app object to. Then after loading plugins:

  app.getService('parser-manager').init(app);

Tah dah.

[leeroybrun]

Perfect, I will give it a try. Thanks !