PLUGINS OVERVIEW

Native Plugins

First page of the Plugins section. Pixels can discover native Go shared objects at startup and give them a deliberately narrow SDK: live-player snapshots and actions, inbound packet interceptors, isolated private HTTP routes, typed events, chat commands, and namespaced permissions. Continue with PLUGINS-SDK for the programming surface and PLUGINS-DEPLOYMENT for the build and operations contract.

Startup model

The loader scans exactly one level below PIXELS_PLUGIN_DIRECTORY:

plugins/
  example-plugin/
    plugin.so
    config-owned-by-the-plugin.json

Only *.so files are interpreted by Pixels. Configuration and data beside a plugin belong entirely to that plugin. Identity is embedded in the binary; no external manifest can drift away from it.

Startup has two phases. Pixels first opens every object and reads every manifest. It rejects malformed metadata, duplicate names, missing dependencies and dependency cycles before registration begins. It then registers the remaining graph in dependency-first order. A plugin whose dependency fails to register is skipped without blocking unrelated plugins.

Every plugin exports one symbol:

var Plugin plugin.Plugin = &example{}

func (*example) Metadata() plugin.Metadata {
	return plugin.Metadata{
		Name:       "example-plugin",
		Version:    "1.0.0",
		Author:     "Example author",
		SDKVersion: plugin.SDKVersion,
	}
}

Names contain lowercase ASCII letters, digits and internal hyphens. A manifest may list other manifest names in Dependencies; it may not depend on itself or repeat a dependency.

Isolation boundary

Plugins run in the server process, so this is a capability boundary rather than a security sandbox. The host never hands a plugin PostgreSQL, Redis, mutable realm objects, the internal event publisher, or raw connection registries. It provides immutable player values and specific actions instead.

Pixels recovers panics at manifest, registration, interceptor, listener, command, route-mount and route-handler boundaries. A callback panic disables that plugin scope while other plugins and native behavior keep running. Interceptor, event and command calls are also bounded by PIXELS_PLUGIN_CALLBACK_TIMEOUT. Timeouts protect the caller, but Go cannot forcibly terminate the plugin's goroutine; plugin code must honor context cancellation and must not start unowned background work.

Native ABI limitation

Go native plugins have no stable cross-build ABI. The host and .so must use the same Go release, GOOS, GOARCH, SDK source, and versions of every shared dependency. SDKVersion gives an early, understandable rejection for known major SDK mismatches, but cannot replace that native requirement.

Native loading is supported where Go's standard plugin package is supported: Linux, macOS and FreeBSD. A Windows host reports that native plugins are unsupported. See PLUGINS-DEPLOYMENT before compiling or moving a binary.