plugins.md

Plugins

What is a plugin?

A plugin is a collection of logics you can attach to your application, in the case of DRTools it simply is a directories with a file called index.js that exports functions.

How to invoke it

Considering that you have a directory where you store all your plugin directories, you can do something like this:

const { PluginsManager } = require('drtools');
const manager = new PluginsManager('directory/with/plugins');
await manager.load();

If you're also making use of the configs manager, you can also do this to make those configuration easily available inside your plugins:

const { ConfigsManager, PluginsManager } = require('drtools');
const configs = new ConfigsManager('directory/with/config/files');
const manager = new PluginsManager('directory/with/plugins', {}, configs);
await manager.load();

Simple plugin

Let's suppose that inside your plugins directory you have another directory called example and inside it a file called index.js with this content:

'use strict';

module.exports = {
    now: () => new Date(),
};

Then you can access it though the plugins manager with something like this:

const func = manager.get('example::now');
console.log(`Current date: ${func()}`);

Simpler plugin

Let's suppose that your plugins is even simpler and exports only one function:

'use strict';

module.exports = () => new Date();

Then you can invoke it with something like this:

const func = manager.get('example::default');
console.log(`Current date: ${func()}`);

Or like like this:

const func = manager.get('example');
console.log(`Current date: ${func()}`);

With config

Let's say you have a configuration file called plugin.example.config.json with these contents:

{
    "level": 9000
}

You can write something like this in your plugin called example:

'use strict';

const config = global['DRTOOLS_PLUGIN_CONFIG_POINTER'];

module.exports = {
    level: () => config.level
};

The prefix plugin in your configuration files tell DRTools that they have to be automatically attached to a plugin when loaded.

TypeScript

Yes, this manager supports the use of TypeScript and if you use index.ts instead of a JavaScript file, it will try to load it.

Complex Structures

There are cases where you plugins may not be a simple folder with at least index.js file. For example, if you're writing your plugin in TypeScript and transpiling it JavaScript you might end up with file at dist/index.js which is not what we said at the beginning.

For these cases, DRTools can looks inside your plugin directory for dist/index, and if it's not found it looks for index.

To activate this behavior, you need to set the option dist as true when creating you manager:

const { PluginsManager } = require('drtools');
const manager = new PluginsManager('directory/with/plugins', { dist: true });
await manager.load();

Options

When you create a new manager you may pass these options in an object as a second argument:

Option	Type	Default	Description
configsPrefix	string	plugin	Configuration file's prefix used to consider them as part of a plugin.
dist	boolean	false	Whether to consider complex structures on plugins.
distPath	string	dist	Sub-directory to check first on complex plugin structures.
verbose	boolean	true	Whether to display loading log information or not.