Plugin Manager

Overview

core.plugin_manager is the main management surface for AstronomicAL’s plugin system. It shows plugin health, lifecycle state, open panels, contributions, dependencies, discovery problems and managed package information from one place.

What You Do

  1. Use Scan for plugins when new local or installed plugins have been added.

  2. Search or filter the plugin list by status, capability or plugin ID.

  3. Select a plugin and review its status, source, contributions, open panels and dependency checks.

  4. Enable or disable plugins that support lifecycle management.

  5. Reload development plugins after changing their code.

  6. Install, update or uninstall AstronomicAL-managed .alplugin packages.

  7. Review discovery issues when a plugin candidate could not be inspected.

Panel

Plugin Manager

The panel contains:

  • summary cards for enabled, available and problematic plugins and open panels;

  • a searchable, filterable plugin table;

  • community-plugin controls;

  • installation from local .alplugin packages;

  • selected-plugin details, contributions and technical information;

  • lifecycle and managed-package controls;

  • discovery issues from the latest plugin scan.

The selected-plugin view shows panels, actions, workflows, open instances, readiness checks and technical details such as capabilities, tags, package requirements, plugin dependencies, services, artifact viewers and settings.

Management Controls

  • Refresh redraws the current plugin state.

  • Scan for plugins runs plugin discovery again.

  • Community plugins controls whether third-party plugins may execute.

  • Enable plugin activates an available plugin.

  • Disable plugin disables it and closes owned panels where required.

  • Reload development plugin reloads enabled development plugins.

  • Install validates and installs a local .alplugin package without enabling or executing it.

  • Update selected plugin replaces an AstronomicAL-managed package. A running plugin is disabled first and is not restarted automatically.

  • Uninstall installed plugin removes AstronomicAL-managed plugin code after confirmation while preserving plugin data.

Lifecycle Rules

Plugin Manager cannot disable or reload itself from inside its own panel. Runtime registrations do not expose lifecycle or package-management controls.

Reload is available only for development plugins. Disabling or reloading a plugin with open panels closes those panel instances and cancels its tracked jobs.

Community plugins also require the global Community plugins switch. A plugin may be configured as enabled but remain blocked while that switch is off.

Caution

Community plugins execute third-party Python code inside AstronomicAL. Only enable plugins you trust. Updating, disabling or reloading a plugin can also discard in-memory controller or service state.

Note

A discovered plugin is not necessarily ready to run. Missing Python packages, required plugins, incompatible versions, registration failures or plugin-state errors can prevent activation. The selected-plugin readiness checks and discovery issues explain the relevant failure where available.