| # Aspect CLI Plugins |
| |
| NB: plugin support is still in design phase, the documentation below may not yet |
| apply. |
| |
| The plugin system is inspired by the excellent system developed for HashiCorp's |
| `terraform` CLI. |
| |
| ## High-level design |
| |
| A plugin is any program with a gRPC server that implements our plugin protocol. |
| We provide convenient support for writing plugins in Go, but this is not |
| required. Plugins are hosted and versioned independently from the aspect CLI. |
| |
| The aspect CLI process spawns the plugin as a subprocess, then connects as a |
| gRPC client to it. The client and server run a negotiation protocol to determine |
| version compatibility and what capabilities the plugin provides. |
| |
| ## Plugin configuration |
| |
| In your [aspect CLI config], list the plugins you'd like to install. You can use |
| semver ranges to constrain the versions which can be used. When aspect runs, it |
| will prompt you to re-lock the dependencies to exact versions if they have |
| changed. We also verify the checksum of the plugin contents against what was |
| first installed. |
| |
| > The locking semantics follow the [Trust on first use] approach. |
| |
| [trust on first use]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_on_first_use |
| [aspect cli config]: TODO |
| |
| ## Plugin discovery |
| |
| TODO: where we search to resolve plugins on disk or fetch them from network |
| TODO: how to author a local plugin and resolve it for development |
| |
| ## Capabilities |
| |
| Plugins can implement any of the following: |
| |
| - BuildComplete |
