Plugin Manager

Purpose

The Plugin Manager discovers plugins, validates their metadata, manages their lifecycle, and owns the contribution registries used by the application.

Discovery

Plugins can be discovered from bundled, development, or user/community locations.

Static manifests allow the host to inspect basic plugin metadata before importing and executing the plugin itself.

Contributions

A plugin can register capabilities such as:

panels;
actions and workflows;
services;
artifact viewers.

The Plugin Manager tracks which plugin owns each contribution so it can clean up correctly during disablement.

Dependencies

Required plugin dependencies are resolved before enablement.

Dependency ordering is deterministic, version requirements are checked, and cycles or missing requirements are reported instead of being ignored.

Enablement is transactional across newly enabled dependencies: if part of the activation fails, contributions created by that activation are rolled back.

Disablement

A plugin cannot be treated as a collection of permanent globals.

When it is disabled, owned jobs are cancelled where possible, panel instances are closed, services and contribution records are removed, and lifecycle cleanup is run.

Activation Policy

Bundled and development plugins may be enabled automatically according to host policy. Community plugins are also subject to the application’s community-plugin setting and persisted per-plugin activation state.

A dependency does not bypass those host trust decisions.

Python Dependencies

Community plugins can use AstronomicAL’s managed Python package overlay for additional compatible dependencies.

The host environment remains authoritative: a plugin must not replace packages owned by AstronomicAL. Dependency resolution is performed before the managed overlay is replaced.

Some native-package changes may require an application restart if extension modules are already loaded.

Trust and Security

Plugins are not sandboxed.

Enabling a plugin executes Python code with the permissions of the AstronomicAL process. Packaging, validation, and activation controls reduce accidental or unsupported installation states, but they do not isolate a plugin from the host.

Third-party plugins should therefore be treated as code the user has chosen to trust. Credentials and sensitive values should not be written into workspace or artifact metadata unless they are explicitly protected.