How do you manage plugins ?

[jeremieca]

Hello,

I have a question about the management of your plugins in C9. At C9, I think that you have multiples projects, with lots of plugins inside. And sometimes, you need to reuse plugin in another project. So :

• Do you use npm private to save your architect plugins and reuse it ?
• Have you a git repository per plugin you want to reuse ?
• How do you resolve architect dependencies when using a plugin ? For example a plugin A with deps on B and C : How do you automatically get B and C when you import A in your project; With NPM ?

If a developper, not working at C9, have an idea on the question, i'm also interested in !

Thanks !

[nightwing]

Hi we use a monorepo, mostly similar to https://github.com/c9/core, and a script to create separate repositories for each plugin from it.

[jeremieca]

Ok, thanks.

So if I well understand, you have one big repo containing all your server with plugins. And you have on repo per plugin (created by a script ?) ?

When you use a plugin in two projects, how do you propagate the change on plugins in the two projects ?

[nightwing]

We have only one project, that runs in many different configurations, and architect is mainly useful for running different configurations.

Currently architect doesn't automatically resolve dependencies. It allows to do the opposite, that is define dependencies manually. Say you have plugin A which provides services x, y and consumes service z, And plugins B and C which both provide service z, but implemented differently/working on different environments. Architect allows to pick plugins B or C without modifying code in A.

For example we have a config that when running on node-webkit loads implementation of clipboard plugin based on node-webkit api, and when running in browser loads the one based on html5 api

The script we have can separate a folder into a new repo and merge changes from the repo back into subfolder, so we could use it to pull changes from one project into another. But this approach would work best if both projects are maintained by same people, it won't work well for third party modules.