Proposal: enhance plugin installation and management.

[justanr]

While working on the ranks plugin (getting close), I noticed a few things that made plugin upgrades difficult and other things that would be nice to have.

1. Add upgrade plugin to both cli and management ui. The primary effect here would be finding any settings that exist for the plugin that are not currently stored and removing ones that are stored by no longer declared by the plugin.

2. add on_plugin_install, on_plugin_uninstall, and on_plugin_upgrade hooks (not attached to the names) and potentially on_plugin_settings_changed so plugins can preform any administrative tasks related to these actions.

An example of using the install/uninstall/upgrade actions would be a plugin that creates a user to interact with users on the forum (e. g. automod, or similar), or if we follow through with the permission revision adding new permissions. Install hook would handle creating these and uninstall would clean them up, upgrade could handle differences between versions.

[micha030201]

Add upgrade plugin to both cli and management ui. The primary effect here would be finding any settings that exist for the plugin that are not currently stored and removing ones that are stored by no longer declared by the plugin.

Does upgrading a plugin not require flaskbb to be restarted? What would be the point of having a button in the interface to upgrade the plugin if the user still has to restart their the app from the console?

[justanr]

Installing is the same way. It's a two step process: pip install plugin and then either running the cli plugin install or the install from the gui. But that step is what creates the entries in the plugin settings table.

The upgrade I'm talking about is the second step. The process does need to be restarted but it'd need to be restarted for installing a new plugin from scratch as well. There are ways to do this without down time but that's outside the scope here.

Right now the only way to get new settings from a plugin is to uninstall and reinstall via the gui or cli. However this erases the current configuration.

[micha030201]

Right now the only way to get new settings from a plugin is to uninstall and reinstall via the gui or cli. However this erases the current configuration.

Ah, I see. Sorry, I misunderstood what the issue was about.

[justanr]

It's overloaded terminology, I could see why it'd be confusing. No problem.