platform/plugins/EXTRACTING-A-PLUGIN.md

Extracting a feature into a plugin

Handing this to a fresh agent? plugins/EXTRACT-A-PLUGIN-PROMPT.md is the kickoff prompt — paste it, replace the feature name, and it points back here. This file is the authority; that one is the way in.

The runbook, written the day offscale became the first one. Follow it for music, then for the rest.

This directory holds documentation, not plugins. Every plugin is its own repository as of 2026-08-15, and arrives in plugins/<name>/ by git clone when somebody installs it — so on a fresh checkout the four references below are URLs, and on a machine where they are installed they are also directories. Both are given.

Read first, in this order:

1. plugins/offscale → PLUGIN.md — every decision and why, including the three that reversed
2. plugins/example — the reference implementation, deliberately the smallest thing that is still a real plugin
3. plugins/offscale — the worked example, all four parts
4. plugins/music → PLUGIN.md — the MESSY worked example: three pieces that stayed behind, and why each is a seam rather than a loose end. Read it if your feature has anything the platform also uses.
5. src/servers/plugins/ — the system itself: manifest, discover, mount, install, ecosystem, schema, generate. This one IS in this repository: the platform owns the plugin system, and only the plugins left.

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The rules. These are not preferences

Every plugin route renders a Workspace with at least one panel. A plugin contributes web/panels.ts (appRegistryMetas, at least one) and web/layout.ts (defaultLayout); the shell renders WorkspaceView around them. There is no way to export a component — a web/ directory missing either file is refused at discovery, by name. Non-compliance is unrepresentable, not forbidden.

Every plugin permission is grantable, per role, at read or write. No kind, no ownerOnly, no field of any sort. The platform's answer is uniform; what a grant means — whose rows a member sees, whether a resource is shared or per-user — is the plugin's own job, in its own queries.

A plugin never hardcodes a colour. Every colour comes from a semantic token — bg-destructive, text-muted-foreground, bg-busy/15, border-border — and never from Tailwind's palette (text-emerald-400, bg-zinc-800, border-red-500/30). Palette classes do not follow the theme, so a plugin using them looks wrong under every theme but the one its author happened to have. The contract is src/workspaces/theme/README.md; the closed set of state tones is components/Data/tone.ts.

Pay this down as part of the extraction, not afterwards. You are already rewriting the imports, and the counts are not small: Soulseek carries 313 palette classes, Invoices 95, Wallet 68, Jellyfin 48, Photos 47, Transmission 41. Left alone, an extraction exports its colour debt into a repository nobody will revisit — and the platform's own ratchet (bun run check:theme) stops covering it the moment the directory leaves.

Two shortcuts that are not shortcuts. text-white and bg-black/60 are fine ONLY over media — a video, a photograph — where they sit on someone's content rather than on a themed surface; everywhere else they are palette classes like any other. And a colour that carries no state (a brand accent, a chart series) belongs in the plugin's own variables, declared once, not sprinkled as literals.

Say permissions, never the other word. It already means three things in this codebase.

The manifest holds only what a directory listing cannot say. Identity facts and human choices: publisher, version, platform, label, summary, icon, color, permissions. Everything structural is convention — presence is the declaration:

manifest.ts        required
api/router.ts      a backend router, mounted at mountPrefix()
db/schema.ts       tables, prefixed <app-name>_
sidecar/index.ts   a process (.mjs instead means node)
web/panels.ts      panels — REQUIRED with web/
web/layout.ts      layout — REQUIRED with web/

A host binary is the one exception, and it goes in the manifest — the tree cannot say it. Declare osDependencies when your plugin shells out to something: the binary to probe on PATH, why it is needed, and a package name per package manager. Absent means self-sufficient, which offscale and example are. Music added the field; see its PLUGIN.md for what it is guarding against.

appName is the directory name. The sidecar runtime is the file extension.

Nothing may branch on provenance except mountPrefix(). First-party and third-party differing anywhere else means two systems, and only one gets tested.

Uninstall never destroys data. The generated schema barrel follows plugin directories, not the install table — db:push drops what it cannot see, so following installs would delete a plugin's tables on uninstall. Only deleting a plugin's source can lose its data.

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The order that worked

1. Map it first. Sidecar, api router, db, frontend, and every line of platform wiring that names it.
2. Move the backend: sidecar/ → plugins/<name>/sidecar/, api/<name>/router.ts → plugins/<name>/api/router.ts (export router, not <name>Router), officer_db/src/<name>/* → plugins/<name>/db/.
3. Rewrite imports. Platform code becomes @@/… (resolves from plugins/ — verified). Queries take officerdb/db and officerdb/crypto. Schema takes officerdb/auth/schema — users.id is the one reference a plugin may make.
4. Write manifest.ts.
5. Move the frontend to web/, as panels.ts + layout.ts. Imports of platform UI become officerdev (the barrel exports WorkspaceView, TerminalView, AppRegistryMeta); hooks/useClient and helpers/clipboard stay as they are.
6. Remove every trace from the platform, and delete rather than comment out: hono.ts mount and import, the permissions/registry.ts entry, App.tsx routes, Screens/Dashboard/index.tsx, AppRegistry.tsx, officerdev/src/index.ts re-exports, Dock.tsx tile, usePageTitle.ts rule, and both database barrels (index.ts and schema.ts).
7. bunx tsgo until clean. It finds the wiring you missed.
8. Verify on the live server — see below.
9. Commit and push. Message says what moved, what it found, and what is still open.

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Verification — run all of it

bun test                     # record the baseline BEFORE you start. Any new failure is yours
pm2 restart officer

Then through /plugins, watching PM2 and the browser at each step:

Step	Expect
install	streamed log; schema applied; sidecar online; route mounted
the plugin's API	answers
the plugin's screen	renders as a Workspace
dock	tile appears
permissions page	its permission is listed, read/write/none
disable	route 404s, sidecar stops, tables and rows survive
enable	comes back
uninstall	route gone, pm2 list loses it, data still there
bun db:push while uninstalled	do not run this — see "What changed on 2026-08-16"
install again	identical to the first install

A normal refresh is enough; the shell is no-store. When the log's last line appears, the bundle exists.

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Traps, all of which cost real time once

• Mount before starting the sidecar. createSidecarProxy learns its port from a one-shot <name>:server event and subscribes when the router is first imported — at mount. Start first and the announcement fires into a void: online process, mounted routes, every request 503. Already fixed in install.ts; do not reorder it.
• src/servers/sidecar/protocol.ts still declares <name>:server per sidecar. Music will need its line kept, or the union generalised to `${string}:server` — which is the better fix and is pending for the whole protocol.
• bunfig.toml plugins do not reach Bun.build(). Tailwind is passed explicitly in generate.ts.
• The shell output is named for the entrypoint (index.gen.html), and naming does not change it.
• A stale generated file (Plugins.gen.tsx, plugin-schemas.gen.ts) will fail the typecheck after a contract change. Regenerate rather than hand-edit.
• Delete the feature's app-store/catalogue.ts entry, or its screen goes blank. permissionAvailability derives from sidecar_installs, and a plugin never gets a row there — its install state is plugin_installs. A leftover catalogue entry therefore makes the permission permanently unavailable, which puts its route into deniedRoutes and withholds the dock tile, on a server where the plugin is installed and healthy. This has now bitten twice: headscale (2026-08-14) and nearly music. The note in catalogue.ts is the one to read.
• Moving a *.test.ts into plugins/ used to stop it running, silently. [test] root was ./src until music; it is now .. If that ever goes back, every extraction quietly shrinks the suite. Compare the FILE COUNT across a run, not just pass/fail — that is the only thing that shows it.
• A manifest is read once per server process. Discovery does await import(manifest.ts), and the module cache holds it for the lifetime of the process — so editing a manifest while developing changes nothing until pm2 restart officer. Costs ten minutes the first time, because the plugins page keeps cheerfully showing the old values. outdated cannot notice a version bump without a restart either.
• A plugin importing platform code is fine (@@/…); the reverse is not. If something in src/ imports from your feature and cannot move — a widget, a relay — that piece stays, and the boundary goes around it. Find those before you plan the split; they decide it for you.

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Music is done. What it changed about this runbook

Extracted 2026-08-15 and verified live through the whole table above. plugins/music → PLUGIN.md is the record; the parts worth carrying forward are already folded into the rules and traps above.

The one thing that generalises: map what the PLATFORM still needs from your feature before you plan the split. Music's boundary was not chosen — it was dictated by two imports pointing the wrong way (a dashboard widget reaching for useMusicPlayer, a cliamp relay reaching for getMusicServerWsUrl), and both were found by reading the import graph rather than by reasoning about what music "is". Offscale had none, so it came out whole and made the job look cleaner than it is.

The three pieces music left behind are officerdev/src/MusicPlayer/, src/servers/api/music/router.ts and everything cliamp. Each is documented where it sits. None of them is work waiting for you — do not tidy them into a plugin as a warm-up.

The global-overlay question is answered, and the answer is no

Music was the first feature wanting to render on every route. It does not get to, and neither will the next one: a shell slot for a plugin-provided component reopens "there is no way to export a component", which is the rule the whole frontend contract rests on. MusicPlayerHost stays in DashboardLayout, gated on its plugin's permission so it switches itself off with the plugin.

Reopen this only for a feature where the overlay is the whole product, and expect to argue for it.

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What changed on 2026-08-16. Read this before following the steps above

A day of installing plugins onto a machine that had never had one found four things. The runbook above is still right about the shape of an extraction; these change how you verify it.

The install no longer runs bun db:push, and you should not either. A plugin's tables are created by pushPluginSchema: drizzle-kit generate against the plugin's schema alone, into an empty directory, then the statements applied one at a time with "already exists" skipped. It cannot emit a DROP of anything.

The global push is a trap on any machine holding tables the current schema does not declare — a plugin that is not on disk, anything left from a rename. drizzle-kit sees a new table appearing while others are due to be dropped and asks, interactively, whether it is a rename. That prompt needs a TTY. --force does not answer it, < /dev/null does not answer it, piping newlines does not either — all measured. With no terminal it applies NOTHING and exits 0, so an install reports success and the plugin fails its first query with 42P01. --force would be worse if it worked: the destructive statements are drop table for every plugin whose directory is absent.

So: the row in the verification table that says to run bun db:push while uninstalled is struck out. The property it was checking — uninstall does not destroy data — is now checked by reinstalling and finding your rows still there.

Use purge to test the install twice. Uninstall deliberately keeps the directory and the tables, so a second install is not a fresh one: the marketplace hides a plugin whose directory exists, and the tables are already there. The Marketplace screen has "Delete and all its data" — it drops the tables, deletes the directory and regenerates the barrel, and afterwards the plugin installs from the catalogue exactly as a stranger's machine would. That is the only honest test of an install.

The install now verifies its own tables. After the push it asks Postgres whether each declared table exists and fails the install naming what is missing. If your extraction reports "schema push reported success but did not create …", the push is the problem, not your schema.

Tables with no owner are now reported. The Marketplace screen lists any table no code on the machine claims, with a row estimate. During an extraction this is how you notice you renamed a table and left the old one behind — it is exactly the state that produced the trap above.

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The marketplace is part of the job now

An extracted plugin is not finished when it installs from disk. It has to be installable from marketplace.officer.dev, which is three things:

1. A public repository that clones anonymously over https. Check it with GIT_TERMINAL_PROMPT=0 git clone --depth 1 <url> /tmp/probe — an SSH remote only works on the machine that published it, and the catalogue rewrites SSH to HTTPS precisely so this cannot be got wrong.
2. A README. It renders on the plugin's page in the store AND in the platform's install pane, so it is the shop window as much as the documentation. plugins/example/README.md is the model, and the house voice applies: state what is missing as plainly as what works.
3. A catalogue row. bun --env-file=.env scripts/marketplace-sync.ts reads every plugin directory's manifest.ts and README and upserts them. Add a matching entry to BUNDLED in src/servers/plugins/marketplace.ts as well — that is the offline fallback, and a machine with no internet shows it.

docs/marketplace.md is the design; docs/marketplace-todo.md is what it does not do yet.

The screen is /marketplace now, not /plugins. The API kept its name.

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Two more rules, learned the same day

The platform must not know what your plugin is about. Not just its code — its VOCABULARY. Ten comments in src/ still explained what Headscale was, months after the code left, and each one was correct and in the wrong repository. When you finish, grep the platform for your feature's domain words, not only its identifiers, and keep only dated history: "X was here until " is a record; explaining what X does is a leak.

Do not add a spawn that trusts $PATH. An install died on Executable not found in $PATH: "bunx", because PM2 starts the platform with a PATH that has bun and not bunx. Resolve a path (node_modules/.bin/…, process.execPath) as pushPluginSchema now does.

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Which one next

No decision has been made. What the tree says, for whoever picks it:

• schema.ts still lists eight commented plugin schemas — email, notify, dav, photos, jellyfin, invoiceshelf, soulseek, vault, wallet. Each line names its tables and the file that defines them, which is exactly what its extraction needs.
• hono.ts still has fifteen commented mounts. Same list, roughly.
• Soulseek is the interesting one, and not because it is easy: docs/navigation-audit.md records its panels making 37 raw upstream calls, which is the mistake the offscale sidecar exists to avoid. Its extraction is a rewrite wearing a move's clothes. Say so up front rather than discovering it at 2am.
• Email and wallet both hold credentials, so they meet secret-store and service_connections in a way neither of the first two did. Read docs/secret-store.md first.

Still open, platform-wide. Do not rediscover these

• Websocket providers — server.reload({ routes }) proven, never called. No plugin owns a socket yet; music would have been the first and cliamp being out of scope is what let it pass.
• assertPermissionTotality reads the wrong list — Object.keys(handlers) while Bun serves the route table, and plugin routes are not in PROTECTED_API_PREFIXES at all. It belongs in buildHonoApp(), now the single place routes are mounted. Security-adjacent; close it before members reach plugin routes. The live example is the two cliamp sockets: served in the route table, claimed by no permission, and invisible to the check. Pinned by a test in registry.test.ts so it stays a known fact.
• Two dock sources — the app store keeps its own catalogue; one when it is rebuilt on this
• Offscale's queries scope by caller, so a granted member sees their own empty list rather than the owner's. Its own job, not the platform's.
• protocol.ts declares <name>:server per sidecar. music:server and headscale:server are both still there for plugins that have left. Generalising the union to `${string}:server` is the fix.
• hasPersonalWrites reads c.personal only, so a plugin declaring the same thing through readOnlyWrites reports false. Nothing renders it, so it is dead on the wire.

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Where the plugins went

Plugin	Repository	In this repo?
example	gitea.officer.dev/plugins/example	no
offscale	gitea.officer.dev/plugins/offscale	no
music	gitea.officer.dev/plugins/music	no

All three are public and clone anonymously over https, which is what the marketplace requires — it clones with no credentials on purpose, so a private plugin cannot be installed from it at all.

.gitignore ignores /plugins/*/ — directories only, so this file and anything beside it stay tracked. The rule exists because a cloned plugin carries its own .git, and a tracked one turns git add -A into a commit of a gitlink: a pointer to a commit this repository does not contain. That is not a mistake to be careful about, it is what installing a plugin does, so it is handled by rule.