Dynamic Plugins and dependency embedding in Red Hat Developer Hub

Overview

Note: The Dynamic Plugin functionality is a tech preview feature of Red Hat Developer Hub and is still under active development. Aspects of developing, packaging and deployment of dynamic plugins are subject to change

This project shows how to embed a common-library dependency into frontend and backend dynamic plugins. Plugins of type common-library are used to share functions and symbols between different frontend and backend plugins. The most common use case is reflected in this example, where a frontend plugin, backend plugin and common library plugin are created with a particular naming convention:

• simple-chat - frontend plugin
• simple-chat-backend - backend plugin
• simple-chat-common - common library plugin

In this case a dependency is added to the simple-chat-backend and simple-chat frontend plugins on this simple-chat-common library.

The export-dynamic-plugin command will examine a plugin's dependencies and when it finds a common library that matches the above naming convention it will be automatically embedded.

It's possible for a plugin to have more common-library dependencies that fall on plugins that don't follow the above naming pattern. In this situation, the export-dynamic-plugin requires explicit instructution to embed these dependencies via the --embed-dependency option.

This example repository shows both of these use cases in practice in plugins/simple-chat-backend, where the backend of this service embeds a common library containing shared types and exports from simple-chat-common and uses an exported function from another common library called some-other-common. In this case, the package.json is modified to update the export-dynamic command to explicitly embed the required common library.

Prerequisites

Note: These are basic prerequisites for building this repository. For prerequisites for deployment see here

• node 20.x (node 18 may work fine also but untested)
• npm (10.8.1 was used during development)
• yarn (at least 3.8.1 is required)

Building this example

To build this example on the command line after cloning:

yarn install

yarn tsc

yarn build:all

yarn export-dynamic

Be sure to observe the output of the export-dynamic command. The command should output that it has embedded both the @internal/backstage-plugin-simple-chat-common and @internal/backstage-plugin-some-other-common packages into the exported simple-chat-backend plugin.

Deploying this example

This example can be deployed following the instructions outlined starting from here, the scripts in this copy have been updated appropriately.