an exclusionary rule, made structural. a plugin does not render a screen: it
contributes panels and says how they are arranged, and the shell renders
WorkspaceView around them.
web/panels.ts appRegistryMetas — at least one panel
web/layout.ts defaultLayout — how they are arranged
both required the moment web/ exists, and missing either is refused at discovery
by name and with the reason. tested:
probeplug: has a web/ directory but is missing web/layout.ts.
Every plugin route renders a Workspace: contribute panels and a layout,
not a screen.
there is deliberately no way to export a component. one that could would be free
to render a bare div, a full-page form, or its own navigation, and the platform
would become a shell hosting strangers' layouts rather than one application.
non-compliance is not so much refused as unrepresentable — there is nowhere to
put a screen.
the shell registers <prefix> and <prefix>/:section, exactly as the core screens
do, so a plugin's sections stay addressable and cmd-clickable, and panels read
useParams independently rather than passing state between themselves.
appTypes.allowed is pinned to that plugin's own keys, so a persisted layout
naming something else falls back instead of rendering another plugin's panel
inside this screen.
the example plugin is rebuilt to model it — two panels, a layout, one of them
calling its own /api/example/ping through useClient — because the reference
implementation is what everyone copies.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
first piece of the plugin system: the platform can now be rebuilt with a
different set of plugins mounted, at runtime, without restarting.
hono cannot do this the obvious way. its default SmartRouter throws "Can not add
a route since the matcher is already built" the moment a route is added after
serving begins, RegExpRouter does the same, and hono has no api to REMOVE a
route at all — so uninstall was impossible even with TrieRouter, which does
allow adding. tested all four.
so nothing is added to a live app. buildHonoApp(plugins) constructs a fresh one
and honoServer is reassigned, which keeps the default fast router and makes
uninstall expressible. server.tsx now serves it through a closure rather than
the bound honoServer.fetch — that one line is the whole mechanism, since the
bound method would capture whichever app existed at serve() and every rebuild
would silently do nothing.
buildHonoApp is pure: everything it needs arrives as an argument, so an app for
a hypothetical plugin set can be built without a database, a filesystem or a
running server.
alongside it, discovery. plugins live at platform/plugins/<app-name>/ — inside
the repo, because bun links the workspace packages into the root node_modules
and that is what lets a plugin author write `import { useClient } from
'hooks/useClient'` with no publishing and no version negotiation. verified with
Bun.resolveSync from a directory there.
discovery is by convention and presence is the declaration: api/router.ts,
db/schema.ts, sidecar/index.ts, web/Router.tsx. the app name comes from the
directory, so it cannot disagree with where the code sits, and the sidecar
runtime comes from the extension — .mjs is node, .ts is bun — which is already
the rule here and cannot contradict the file it describes.
a broken plugin is collected, never thrown: one unreadable manifest must not
stop the boot or hide the nine beside it that are fine.
verified by booting the refactored server on a spare port — /api answers 200,
protected routes still 401. full suite: 719 pass, and the same 10 failures as
before this change (8 in capabilities, plus cliamp and pty), stash-verified
earlier as pre-existing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>