[pve-devel] pve-manager/www: API for external plugins?

[Ilya Krel]

Hi Thomas and Roland,  No problem about being added to the discussion!

The GUI/Add operation has yet to be high on our list; adding storage via a
one-time CLI command has not been a deployment challenge. However, our team
would be happy to review and test the interface if one is
proposed/submitted!

Sincerely,
Ilya

On Fri, Nov 4, 2022 at 9:46 AM Thomas Lamprecht <t.lamprecht at proxmox.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Am 03/11/2022 um 11:28 schrieb Roland Kammerer:
> > I'm the maintainer of the linstor-proxmox plugin and thanks to your
> > storage plugin API we have a strong FLOSS and customer user base. What
> > would be nice for our users is better integration in the web GUI,
> > especially in "Datacenter -> Storage -> Add".
> >
> > I'm not a web dev at all, I just patched in a new entry into
> > pvemanagerlib.js. From what I see in the Makefile that itself is just
> > the concatenated version of several .js files. Would it be possible to
> > have an extra "plugin.js" that then just includes all .js from some
> > /i/dont/know/plugins/ directory? I also saw that there is at least one
> > dict that glues things together (storageSchema in Utils.js), so there
> > probably would be some need to "register" external plugins into these
> > data structures. And that is where I stop showing my entire lack of web
> > development knowledge :).
>
> We won't add any-JS includes, that's just really messy in the dynamically
> prototype "mess" JS is and we cannot guarantee a safe execution at all,
> which for the Storage plugin backend is at least only the admin-owned
> server, that the admin setups themselves anyway, not all users through
> all browsers.
>
> Iff, there needs a more schematic approach provided by the backend via an
> schema-checked API call, more on that below.
>
> >
> > Could you provide some kind of API that allows external plugins to
> > integrate into the GUI? Or maybe it even exists and I did not see it?
> >
>
> No, there's no functionality at the moment. We got such a request also from
> the quite active BlockBridge devs, and my reply[0] contains some hints in
> how one could achieve that, in short, similar to how we handle the more
> popular ones from the huge amount of different acme.sh plugins, via a
> schema[1][2] that gets dynamically translated to a form in the web
> interface[3].
>
> If done somewhat nicely and safely we'd accept such a thing, the plugins
> would get an new method (e.g., api_schema) that returns a perl hash ref
> containing the properties including type, description and flags like if the
> setting is editable (after storage addition), and a new API endpoint
> returning the schema's of all (external) plugins similar so that they can
> be
> shown in the add Drop down and used for creating the basic form.
>
> Do you want to work on something like that? We can try to help on
> questions,
> review and with some polishing, but the major effort may need to come from
> parties interested in this, but maybe the BlockBridge devs (I CCd Ilya,
> hope
> that was OK) are still interested in that too, and can help, if only by
> verifying that the solution is generic enough to be useful to more than one
> specific external Plugin.
>
> regards,
> Thomas
>
> [0]: https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3420#c1
> [1]:
> https://git.proxmox.com/?p=proxmox-acme.git;a=blob;f=src/dns-challenge-schema.README;h=1de1cd115a765e1d1917733db84c21a6c952a441;hb=HEAD
> [2]:
> https://git.proxmox.com/?p=proxmox-acme.git;a=blob;f=src/dns-challenge-schema.json;h=39ac2babdd5eef71d5a31216375bc970098bad76;hb=HEAD
> [3]:
> https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pve-manager.git;a=blob;f=www/manager6/dc/ACMEPluginEdit.js;h=570b4dd20038c49ddd2b68153e672b8deae0cf4d;hb=HEAD#l19
>
>