[Avogadro-devel] Avo2: List of Plugin Repositories

[Geoffrey Hutchison]

Hi Paul,

I met with Ethan today and he has a working version of the plugin downloader.

What’s your thought on a source for the list of repositories? We have the avogadro.cc domain - but I’d like to make sure that there’s an easy way (e.g., git) to update the list.

Should I create plugins.avogadro.cc as a subdomain and just serve one URL for now:
https://plugins.avogadro.cc/repositories/

I can also easily create something from GitHub.io:
http://avogadro.github.io
https://github.com/Avogadro/Avogadro.github.io

I agree that eventually this will likely become a web service, so I’d like to have some reasonable flexibility.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
-Geoff

[Boone, Paul]

I would define a JSON file that contains the info we want to have for all the plugins–presumably a subset of our plugin.json file: author, version, name, url, description. Basically, whatever we want to display in the Avogadro UI to give the user enough information to decide whether they want to install or not. We can statically host the JSON file anywhere to begin with, but preferably on a domain you own where we can eventually replace the static file with a web service that returns JSON. If we get the JSON and the URL right, we can make the change from static file to dynamic file without any change to the C code making the request.

Or we could take it one step further and just keep a list of URLs for all the git repos we know of for plugins, and write a simple nightly script that grabs the plugin.json file from each repo, extracts the five keys we need, and compiles the full JSON file.

That might be totally sufficient for a long time, until we get enough traction to want to keep the info cached in a local database, and allow people to submit their plugins automatically, etc.

Paul

On Jan 10, 2017, 11:18 PM -0500, Geoffrey Hutchison <***@gmail.com>, wrote:
Hi Paul,

I met with Ethan today and he has a working version of the plugin downloader.

What’s your thought on a source for the list of repositories? We have the avogadro.cc domain - but I’d like to make sure that there’s an easy way (e.g., git) to update the list.

Should I create plugins.avogadro.cc as a subdomain and just serve one URL for now:
https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fplugins.avogadro.cc%2Frepositories%2F&data=01%7C01%7Cpaulboone%40pitt.edu%7C0dba783f8f9c474b03c608d439d8f009%7C9ef9f489e0a04eeb87cc3a526112fd0d%7C1&sdata=JqLacIB20Q7ASmRO4u8858D1XtmZbfv2%2B%2F0lAUo9YAQ%3D&reserved=0

I can also easily create something from GitHub.io:
https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Favogadro.github.io&data=01%7C01%7Cpaulboone%40pitt.edu%7C0dba783f8f9c474b03c608d439d8f009%7C9ef9f489e0a04eeb87cc3a526112fd0d%7C1&sdata=yDVogwutny%2FVwVRnKwMSmbSOvX%2Bu8X%2FfR7YmNPZsvj0%3D&reserved=0
https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FAvogadro%2FAvogadro.github.io&data=01%7C01%7Cpaulboone%40pitt.edu%7C0dba783f8f9c474b03c608d439d8f009%7C9ef9f489e0a04eeb87cc3a526112fd0d%7C1&sdata=b9mEuKVdhk%2FXiT8kWMvHigw1sEIGV1vChbzx2e9gDTs%3D&reserved=0

I agree that eventually this will likely become a web service, so I’d like to have some reasonable flexibility.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
-Geoff

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

Post by Boone, Paul
On Jan 10, 2017, 11:18 PM -0500, Geoffrey Hutchison
I met with Ethan today and he has a working version of the plugin downloader.
What’s your thought on a source for the list of repositories? We have the
avogadro.cc domain - but I’d like to make sure that there’s an easy way
(e.g., git) to update the list.

From my perspective I think we want to make sure it uses SSL, and I
would have thought some sort of static generation would be ideal in
the short to medium term, even long term it could be generated from a
Git repo we control, and pushed to something like GitHub pages (offers
SSL, but not easily with CNAME), or FireBase (it actually offers a
JSON database feature that might prove useful in future, but is great
for deploying static content to).

I have been experimenting with static site generation, and found
Firebase to be nice and it supports custom domains well with SSL
certificates. I think having Git, and the history that comes with it,
would be needed to ensure we can all see and verify the history. I
would like to see signed tags/commits, but using a controlled
repository would be sufficient.

Marcus