[Kimchi-devel] [RFC] Plugin management - disable/enable WoK plug-ins

[Daniel Henrique Barboza]

Hi there,

I am working in a way to enable/disable WoK plug-ins using an API. This is
what we already have regarding plugin management:

- each plug-in has a configuration file, for example ginger.conf:

[wok]
# Enable Ginger plugin on Wok server (values: True|False)
enable = True

(...)


- an API that returns all enable plug-ins:

$  curl -k -u danielhb -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Accept: 
application/json" -X GET  'https://localhost:8001/plugins'
Enter host password for user 'danielhb':
[
   "gingerbase",
   "kimchi",
   "ginger"
]

The API retrieves the contents of each plug-in config file and return the
plug-in name if enable = True.


This is my proposal to implement this new feature without messing around
too much:

- the /plugins API will now returns all plug-ins, regardless of the 
plug-in being
loaded or not. In the previous example the returned value would be:

[{ "name: "gingerbase", "enabled": True} ,
  { "name: "ginger", "enabled": True},
  { "name: "kimchi", "enabled": True} ]


Changes in the existing API calls will be made considering this new format.

- A new PUT method to change the 'enabled' attribute of the plug-ins. 
Changing
the attribute will write the new value in the plug-in config file, 
allowing WoK
to enable/disable the plug-in in the next reboot.

- To make the changes effective we need to reboot WoK after 
enabling/disabling
a plug-in. This can be done by either rebooting WoK in the same PUT 
operation I
mentioned above or by a new 'reboot' API in WoK. I am more fond of a new API
but I can live with this 'super PUT' API too.


Note that at this moment we will not supporting load/unload of plug-ins 
without
rebooting WoK. This has proven to be challenging considering our current
plug-in loading schema in cherrypy.


Thoughts?


Daniel