That’s cool to hear, Marcel! Happy to share my thoughts.
A couple reasons I don’t want to use plugins:
1. I don’t want to turn on Koha plugins for 100+ different Koha instances
around the world.
a. Overall, I think the Koha plugin system is insecure, and allows library
staff too much control over the system. I typically keep it disabled with only
a few exceptions. (I’ve opened a few bugs and provided a few patches for
improving plugin security but they haven’t gone anywhere yet on Bugzilla.)
b. I also wouldn’t want library staff to potentially meddle with the
plugin I install. I think this plugin is really a system plugin rather than a
user plugin. It should be invisible to library staff.
2. I’d be looking to install/upgrade plugin code on 100+ different Koha
instances which presents a maintenance challenge
a. While I think some vendors use Ansible to do this, I’m not currently
satisfied with the CLI plugin tooling for install/upgrade/downgrade/uninstall.
(I’ve done some work on this as well on Bugzilla but the work hasn’t progressed
and it’s dropped down my priority list.)
i. Using an
Ansible push also isn’t an option in some security/operational contexts. In
some contexts, you provide artifacts and leave deployment/operations up to a
different team
b. I rather install this “system plugin” 1 time on a server rather than X
times. (I think this is something some other vendors have struggled with and
worked around as well.)
c. I’d need to change the instance creation process to install this plugin
as well. (Not the end of the world but a bit annoying and introduces more room
for errors.)
That said, the hooks already exist, so I can see the appeal, and I can see how
they’d work well for other people, especially with fewer Koha instances to
manage.
I suppose it mostly comes down to control, security, and
maintenance/management.
Also, other systems like Dspace and Fedora write out to message queues out of
the box, and it makes it easy to add integrations to them without touching the
core application at all. It would be great if Koha could do the same without
needing a plugin. (If it were core functionality, we could use it for indexing
as well and replace the “zebraqueue”.)
David Cook
Senior Software Engineer
Prosentient Systems
Suite 7.03
6a Glen St
Milsons Point NSW 2061
Australia
Office: 02 9212 0899
Online: 02 8005 0595
From: Koha-devel <koha-devel-boun...@lists.koha-community.org> On Behalf Of
Marcel de Rooy
Sent: Thursday, 2 December 2021 6:15 PM
To: 'koha-devel' <koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org>
Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] [Changed topic] Action hooks
> I also have a use case where I want to send Koha biblio data elsewhere on
> create/update/delete, but Koha plugins won't be suitable. I've been thinking
> that it would be good to publish a message to a RabbitMQ topic on biblio
> create/update/delete. In fact, that could potentially replace the existing
> C4::Biblio::_after_biblio_action_hooks and
> Koha::Item::_after_item_action_hooks functions, and then the
> background_jobs_worker.pl or some other work could invoke the plugins.
I am running plugins to do the same for some time already. They are pushing
these crud actions to a message queue. Works fine for me. Could you tell what
makes plugins not suitable for that task?
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