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The Future of Plugman and CLI

In this branch, Plugman is undergoing major changes to make the split of responsibilities between plugman and cordova-cli clear.

Responsibilities

  • cordova-cli is responsible for handling multiple platforms. That means it has the separate platforms/{ios,android,etc} directories, a top-level www/ and so on.
  • plugman is responsible for everything to do with plugins: fetching them, installing native code, installing JS code, keeping track of which ones are installed, removing them.

High-level changes

Plugman now holds onto the code of the plugin, instead of cloning it into a temporary folder and throwing it away. By default it uses the cordova/plugins directory, but this can be overridden with --plugins_dir=some/path. This enables cordova-cli to use its top-level plugins/ directory.

See the next section for the changes to the commands and arguments.

Commands

--fetch

Does the actual downloading of the plugin, from Github, the repository or the local disk.

This supports cordova-cli, which will want to --fetch once into its top-level plugins/ directory and then --install once for each platform.

--install

Takes the previously fetched plugin files and installs them into a project. Needs a path to the plugin directory, the path to the project, and the platform, similar to now.

Installs the native code and makes the necessary configuration changes.

--uninstall

Removes the native code and undoes the configuration changes and so on.

Care is required here not to remove permissions that are still needed by other plugins. (Read: config changes should be cleared and recreated from the currently installed plugins every time. This applies to permissions, <plugin> tags and so on.)

--prepare

Takes over part of cordova-cli's prepare command. Copies all plugins' Javascript files (more precisely, those specified in <js-module> tags rather than <asset> tags) into www/plugins/com.plugin.id/whatever/path/file.js and constructs the cordova_plugins.json file.

cordova.js in this new model will have code that reads this cordova_plugins.json file via XHR, loads the JS files for the plugins, and does their clobbers and merges.

This is something of a change from the current cordova-cli method, but necessary because we won't be working with a fresh cordova.js file on each run anymore.