DriverVault/API Server/internal/plugins/README.md

Building DriverVault Plugins

A plugin integrates an external third-party service (vehicle data, parts catalogs, notifications, file storage, …) behind one uniform contract. There are two kinds:

Kind	Written as	Added by	Rebuild?	Use when
built-in	Go code in this repo	a rebuild	yes	first-party, high-trust, type-safe connectors
external	any HTTP service	registering a URL at runtime	no	third-party / less-trusted / independently deployed

Both implement the same behaviour; the server treats them identically. Enable state and per-plugin config persist to PocketBase and load on boot. Every plugin is managed by a superadmin from the panel (/) or the /api/admin/plugins* API.

---

The contract

All plugins satisfy the Go interface in plugin.go:

type Plugin interface {
    Descriptor() Descriptor
    Init(ctx context.Context, config map[string]string) error
    HealthCheck(ctx context.Context) Health
    Invoke(ctx context.Context, action string, params json.RawMessage) (json.RawMessage, error)
    Shutdown(ctx context.Context) error
}

• Descriptor — static metadata (name, provider, version, capabilities, auth type, config fields). Drives the panel UI.
• Init — called with the resolved config (secrets included) whenever the plugin is enabled or its config changes. Prepare clients/tokens here.
• HealthCheck — probe the upstream and classify: Health{Status, LatencyMs, Detail} where Status is StatusOK / StatusDegraded / StatusDown.
• Invoke — run a named capability. There is no generic invoke endpoint yet, but this is live: the integration routes and the vehicle-provider layer call it through Manager.InvokeWith / InvokeBatchWith, so implement it properly. It must be safe for concurrent use — the live instance is shared across requests, and InvokeBatchWith runs a batch of actions in parallel on one instance.
• Shutdown — release resources.

Descriptor & config fields

Descriptor{
    Name:         "acme",              // unique id, [a-z0-9-]
    Provider:     "ACME Corp",         // human label
    Version:      "1.0.0",
    Kind:         plugins.KindBuiltin, // or KindExternal
    Category:     plugins.CategoryAPIsExternal, // which panel tab it lands under
    Capabilities: []plugins.Capability{
        {ID: "widgets.list", Method: "GET", Endpoint: "/widgets", Description: "List widgets."},
    },
    AuthType:     plugins.AuthAPIKey,  // None | APIKey | Basic | OAuth2 | Webhook (metadata only)
    ConfigFields: []plugins.ConfigField{
        {Key: "apiKey", Label: "API key", Type: "password", Required: true, Secret: true,
         Help: "Found under ACME → Settings → API."},
        {Key: "region", Label: "Region", Type: "text", Help: "e.g. eu-west-1"},
    },
}

Category groups the plugin under a tab in the panel's Plugins card — one of CategoryVehicles, CategoryChargers, CategoryNotifications, CategoryAPIsExternal, CategoryDrivesExternal or CategoryDrivesLocal. An empty or unrecognised value is shown under Other APIs, so a plugin never disappears. Adding a new category means adding the constant in plugin.go, the tab order in panel/src/components/PluginsCard.vue, and its label in all three panel/src/i18n/*.json.

ConfigField.Type is "text", "password", or "number" (form input hint). Set Secret: true for credentials — the server never echoes them back in clear; the panel shows a mask (••••••••), and on save a field left at the mask keeps its stored value (so operators don't retype secrets). Required: true fields must be non-empty before the plugin can be enabled.

---

Building a built-in plugin

1. Create a package under internal/plugins/builtin/<name>/.
2. Implement Plugin and register it in init().
3. Blank-import your package from builtin/builtin.go.
4. Rebuild the server.

Minimal example — internal/plugins/builtin/acme/acme.go

package acme

import (
    "context"
    "encoding/json"
    "net/http"
    "strings"
    "time"

    "drivervault/apiserver/internal/plugins"
)

func init() {
    plugins.Register("acme", func() plugins.Plugin { return &Plugin{} })
}

type Plugin struct {
    apiKey string
    region string
    client *http.Client
}

func (p *Plugin) Descriptor() plugins.Descriptor {
    return plugins.Descriptor{
        Name: "acme", Provider: "ACME Corp", Version: "1.0.0",
        Kind: plugins.KindBuiltin, AuthType: plugins.AuthAPIKey,
        Capabilities: []plugins.Capability{
        {ID: "widgets.list", Method: "GET", Endpoint: "/widgets", Description: "List widgets."},
    },
        ConfigFields: []plugins.ConfigField{
            {Key: "apiKey", Label: "API key", Type: "password", Required: true, Secret: true},
            {Key: "region", Label: "Region", Type: "text"},
        },
    }
}

func (p *Plugin) Init(_ context.Context, config map[string]string) error {
    p.apiKey = strings.TrimSpace(config["apiKey"])
    p.region = strings.TrimSpace(config["region"])
    p.client = &http.Client{Timeout: 10 * time.Second}
    return nil
}

func (p *Plugin) HealthCheck(ctx context.Context) plugins.Health {
    start := time.Now()
    req, _ := http.NewRequestWithContext(ctx, http.MethodGet, "https://api.acme.example/ping", nil)
    req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+p.apiKey)
    resp, err := p.client.Do(req)
    lat := time.Since(start).Milliseconds()
    if err != nil {
        return plugins.Health{Status: plugins.StatusDown, LatencyMs: lat, Detail: err.Error()}
    }
    defer resp.Body.Close()
    if resp.StatusCode >= 200 && resp.StatusCode < 300 {
        return plugins.Health{Status: plugins.StatusOK, LatencyMs: lat, Detail: "reachable"}
    }
    return plugins.Health{Status: plugins.StatusDown, LatencyMs: lat, Detail: "HTTP " + resp.Status}
}

func (p *Plugin) Invoke(ctx context.Context, action string, params json.RawMessage) (json.RawMessage, error) {
    // Implement your capabilities; return normalized JSON. Must be safe for
    // concurrent use — one instance serves many requests.
    return json.RawMessage(`{"ok":true}`), nil
}

func (p *Plugin) Shutdown(context.Context) error { return nil }

Register it for compilation — internal/plugins/builtin/builtin.go

import (
    _ "drivervault/apiserver/internal/plugins/builtin/acme"
)

Rebuild

cd "API Server"
go build -o bin/api-server.exe ./cmd/server

Restart the server. The plugin appears in the panel's Plugins card, disabled by default.

DriverVault ships four built-in connectors today — toyota (Toyota Connected / MyToyota, read-only vehicle data), anker-solix (Anker Solix V1 EV charger), greencell (Greencell HabuDen EV charger, read over the owner's MQTT broker rather than a cloud API) and apprise (notifications, through an apprise-api gateway the operator runs) — all blank-imported from builtin/builtin.go. The external kind below needs no rebuild and is the easier place to start a new one.

---

Building an external plugin (no rebuild)

An external plugin is any HTTP service you host (Go recommended, but any language works). You register its base URL at runtime; the server drives it over a tiny JSON contract.

The HTTP contract

Method & path	Purpose	Response
GET {base}/manifest	describe the plugin (optional)	{provider, version, capabilities, authType, configFields}
GET {base}/health	health probe (required)	2xx = healthy; optional body {status, detail}
POST {base}/invoke	run a capability (optional; unused in v1)	{action, params} in → arbitrary JSON out

Health rules the server applies: transport error or 5xx → down; 2xx → ok; anything else → degraded. An explicit {"status":"ok|degraded|down","detail":"…"} body overrides the status-code heuristic. Bodies are size-limited (health 64 KiB, manifest 1 MiB).

Minimal example — a Go plugin service

package main

import (
    "encoding/json"
    "net/http"
)

func main() {
    http.HandleFunc("/manifest", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
        json.NewEncoder(w).Encode(map[string]any{
            "provider":     "ACME Cloud",
            "version":      "2.1.0",
            "authType":     "apikey",
            "capabilities": []map[string]any{
                {"id": "widgets.list", "method": "GET", "endpoint": "/widgets", "description": "List widgets."},
            }, // a plain []string{"widgets.list"} is also accepted
            "configFields": []map[string]any{
                {"key": "apiKey", "label": "API key", "type": "password", "required": true, "secret": true},
            },
        })
    })
    http.HandleFunc("/health", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
        json.NewEncoder(w).Encode(map[string]any{"status": "ok", "detail": "acme cloud reachable"})
    })
    http.HandleFunc("/invoke", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
        var in struct {
            Action string          `json:"action"`
            Params json.RawMessage `json:"params"`
        }
        json.NewDecoder(r.Body).Decode(&in)
        json.NewEncoder(w).Encode(map[string]any{"ok": true, "action": in.Action})
    })
    http.ListenAndServe(":9100", nil)
}

Register it

From the panel's Plugins card → Register external plugin (name + base URL), or via the API:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/admin/plugins \
  -H "Authorization: $SUPERADMIN_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name":"acme-cloud","baseURL":"http://127.0.0.1:9100","provider":"ACME Cloud"}'

It starts disabled; enable it and run a health check from the panel. Because it runs as its own process/container, an external plugin is also the sandboxing path for less-trusted integrations.

---

Lifecycle, config & secrets

• Enable/disable and config persist to PocketBase: the app_settings record keyed global, in its pluginSettings field. That is the top (L1) layer of the integration cascade, stored the same way the org (L2) and user (L3) layers are. Enabling calls Init; disabling calls Shutdown.
• Before the settings have been read — a cold database, or a service account still to be configured — every /api/admin/plugins* endpoint answers 503 and no write is accepted. The server never treats an unreachable database as "no plugins configured", so an outage cannot quietly erase the settings; it retries in the background until the read succeeds.
• If the app_settings collection is missing — an upgrade on a stack that runs with PB_BOOTSTRAP=false, so the on-boot schema pass never created it — the server creates that one collection itself and reads again. A missing collection is told apart from a database that is merely unreachable, because the remedy differs: creating collections is the wrong reflex during an outage.
• Secrets (Secret: true fields) are returned masked. On save, a field still equal to the mask keeps its stored value; send a new value to change it, or an empty string to clear it.
• Required fields are validated when enabling — enabling fails with a clear error if one is blank.
• If Init fails (e.g. bad credentials), the state is still saved and the API returns the plugin plus a warning; fix the config and re-save.

---

Managing plugins (superadmin API)

All endpoints require a superadmin bearer token (Authorization: <token> from POST /api/auth/login). See the panel's Management API reference too.

Method	Path	Body	Purpose
GET	/api/admin/plugins	—	list all plugins + state + last health
GET	/api/admin/plugins/{name}	—	one plugin
PUT	/api/admin/plugins/{name}	{enabled?, config?}	enable/disable + configure
POST	/api/admin/plugins	{name, baseURL, provider?}	register an external plugin
DELETE	/api/admin/plugins/{name}	—	remove an external plugin (built-ins only disable)
POST	/api/admin/plugins/{name}/health	—	run a health check now

---

Testing your plugin

1. Build + restart (built-in) or start your service (external) and register it.
2. GET /api/admin/plugins → confirm your descriptor, config fields, capabilities.
3. PUT /api/admin/plugins/{name} {"enabled":true, "config":{…}} → enable with config.
4. POST /api/admin/plugins/{name}/health → confirm the live probe classifies correctly.
5. Restart the server → confirm state reloads from PocketBase.

A Go unit test can exercise a built-in directly:

p := &acme.Plugin{}
_ = p.Init(context.Background(), map[string]string{"apiKey": "test"})
if h := p.HealthCheck(context.Background()); h.Status == "" {
    t.Fatal("expected a health status")
}

---

Not yet implemented (roadmap)

The contract is shaped for these; see doc.go:

• Generic invocation API — an endpoint to call any plugin's Invoke from a client, with a normalized request/response envelope. The purpose-built callers exist (Manager.InvokeWith / InvokeBatchWith, driven by the integration routes and internal/api/vehicleproviders.go); what is missing is the generic route.
• Resilience — retry/backoff, circuit breaker, per-plugin latency/error metrics.
• Per-tenant credentials for arbitrary plugins — the three per-user connectors already have them, through the hand-written /api/integrations/toyota, /api/integrations/anker-solix and /api/integrations/greencell routes and their superadmin → org admin → user config cascade. Each is a near-copy of the last, which is the argument for the generic version: per-org/per-user config keyed off ConfigFields, so a newly registered plugin gets the same treatment without new endpoints. apprise deliberately sits outside that cascade — the notification gateway is infrastructure the operator runs, not an account a driver owns — so its config is global only, and baseUrl is Required because nothing further down can supply it.
• Audit logging of plugin access. (Charger control commands are already audited to the control_audit collection; this is the wider plugin case.)

Until the generic invocation API lands, Invoke is reachable only through the purpose-built routes: the two integrations' own endpoints, and the vehicle-provider layer that builds a car from a manufacturer account and feeds the car's provider tab (see internal/api/vehicleproviders.go).