web-plugins is a very general purpose plugin system for web applications.

It provides facilities for loading multiple plugins and a single theme. In the future, the web-plugins-dynamic library will allow plugins and themes to be loaded and unloaded at runtime.

A key aspect of web-plugins is that all plugins for a particular system have the same type signature. This is what makes it possible to load new plugins at runtime.

This plugin system is not tied to any particular web server framework or template engine.

There are four steps to using web-plugins:

1. initialize the plugins system
2. initialize the individual plugins
3. set the theme
4. route incoming requests to the correct plugin

To use web-plugins, you first initialize a Plugins handle.

The Plugins handle is heavily parameterized:

newtype Plugins theme m hook config st = ...

theme

is (not suprisingly) the type for you theme.

m

is the monad that your plugin handlers will run in. (e.g., ServerPart)

hook

is additional actions that should be called after the plugins have been initialized

config

provides read-only configuration information

st

provides mutable state that is shared between all plugins. (There is a separate mechanism for plugin-local state.)

The plugin system is typically started by using withPlugins. Though, if needed, you can call initPlugins and destroyPlugins instead.

The Plugin record is used to create a plugin:

data Plugin url theme n hook config st = Plugin
    { pluginName           :: PluginName
    , pluginInit           :: Plugins theme n hook config st -> IO (Maybe Text)
    , pluginDepends        :: [PluginName]   -- ^ plugins which much be initialized before this one can be
    , pluginToPathSegments :: url -> Text
    , pluginPostHook       :: hook
    }

You will note that it has the same type parameters as Plugins plus an additional url parameter.

pluginName

is a simple Text value which should uniquely identify the plugin.

pluginInit

will be called automatically when the plugin is loaded.

pluginDepends

is a list of plugins which must be loaded before this plugin can be initialized.

pluginToPathSegments

is the function that is used to convert the url type to the URL path segments

pluginPostHook

is the hook that you want called after the system has been initialized.

A Plugin is initialized using the initPlugin function (which calls the pluginInit field among other things).

-- | initialize a plugin
initPlugin :: (Typeable url) =>
              Plugins theme n hook config st    -- ^ Plugins handle
           -> Text                              -- ^ base URI to prepend to generated URLs
           -> Plugin url theme n hook config st -- ^ Plugin to initialize
           -> IO (Maybe Text)                   -- ^ possible error message

A lot of the magic happens in the pluginInit function in the Plugin record. Let's look at a simple example. We will use the following type aliases to parameterize the Plugins and Plugin type:

type ExamplePlugins    = Plugins    Theme (ServerPart Response) (IO ()) () ()
type ExamplePlugin url = Plugin url Theme (ServerPart Response) (IO ()) () ()

Here is the initialization function for myPlugin:

myInit :: ExamplePlugins -> IO (Maybe Text)
myInit plugins =
    do (Just clckShowFn) <- getPluginRouteFn plugins (pluginName clckPlugin)
       (Just myShowFn)   <- getPluginRouteFn plugins (pluginName myPlugin)
       acid <- liftIO $ openLocalState MyState
       addCleanup plugins OnNormal  (putStrLn "myPlugin: normal shutdown"  >> createCheckpointAndClose acid)
       addCleanup plugins OnFailure (putStrLn "myPlugin: failure shutdown" >> closeAcidState acid)
       addHandler plugins (pluginName myPlugin) (myPluginHandler acid clckShowFn myShowFn)
       putStrLn "myInit completed."
       return Nothing

There are a few things to note here:

getPluginRouteFn is used to retrieve the the URL route showing function for various plugins. In this case, the plugin needs to generate routes for itself and also routes in the clckPlugin.

Next it opens up an AcidState. It then registers two different cleanup functions. The OnNormal cleanup will only be called if the system is shutdown normally. The OnFailure will be called if the system is shutdown due to some error condition. If we wanted to perform the same shutdown procedure regardless of termination cause, we could use the Always condition instead.

the addHandler then registers the function which route requests for this plugin:

addHandler :: MonadIO m =>
              Plugins theme n hook config st
            -> PluginName -- plugin name / prefix
            -> (Plugins theme n hook config st -> [Text] -> n)
            -> m ()

Each plugin should be registered using a unique prefix. When the handler is called it will be passed the Plugins handle and a list of Text values. In practice, the list Text values is typically the unconsumed path segments from the URL.

Setting the theme is done by calling the setTheme function:

-- | set the current theme
setTheme :: (MonadIO m) =>
            Plugins theme n hook config st
         -> Maybe theme
         -> m ()

Setting the theme to Nothing will unload the theme but not load a new one.

Incoming requests are routed to the various plugins via the serve function:

-- | serve requests using the Plugins handle
serve :: Plugins theme n hook config st -- ^ Plugins handle
      -> PluginName -- ^ name of the plugin to handle this request
      -> [Text]     -- ^ unconsume path segments to pass to handler
      -> IO (Either String n)

The expected usage is that you are going to have request with a url such as:

/my/extra/path/segments

The code will treat the first path segment as the plugin to be called and pass in the remaining segments as the [Text] arguments:

serve plugins "my" ["extra","path","segments"]

the serve function itself knows nothing about the web -- it is framework agnostic. Here is a simple main function that shows how to tie everything together:

main :: IO ()
main =
  withPlugins () () $ \plugins ->
    do initPlugin plugins "" clckPlugin
       initPlugin plugins "" myPlugin
       setTheme plugins (Just theme)
       hooks <- getPostHooks plugins
       sequence_ hooks
       simpleHTTP nullConf $ path $ \p -> do
         ps <- fmap rqPaths askRq
         r <- liftIO $ serve plugins p (map Text.pack ps)
         case r of
           (Left e) -> internalServerError $ toResponse e
           (Right sp) -> sp

In this example, we do not use the config or st parameters so we just set them to ().

Note that we are responsible for calling the hooks after we have initialized all the plugins.