Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
31 lines (19 loc) · 3.25 KB

plugins-system.md

File metadata and controls

31 lines (19 loc) · 3.25 KB
Raw

Plugins System

yast2-users provides a plugins system. Any YaST module can supply its own users plugins in order to extend yast2-users with more users and groups features. For example, yast-samba-server offers plugins which allow to edit some LDAP attributes related to SAMBA users and groups.

How Plugins Works

In yast2-users, the forms for creating or editing users and groups contain a Plug-Ins tab. Such a tab lists all the available plugins for the current user/group and there is a button for launching the selected plugin. Launching a plugin means to execute a new client indicated by the plugin. That client will show an UI with extra options to configure the current user or group.

Plug-Ins Tab

Technical Details

A yast2-users plugin is a module file deployed at yast2dir/modules directory and whose name begins with UsersPlugin. For example, yast2-samba-server provides yast2dir/modules/UsersPluginSamba.pm and yast2dir/modules/UsersPluginSambaGroups.pm plugins. In essence, yast2-users will search for all UsersPlugin* modules and will list them in the Plug-Ins tab.

A plugin module is expected to provide an Interface method. That method returns a list of method names that can be sent to the module. For example, a module usually exposes methods like GUIClient, Name, Summary, Restriction, InternalAttributes, etc. yast2-users uses these methods to get information from the plugins or to execute some actions. For example, the methods Name and Summary are used to get the name and description of the plugins, and that information is then used in the table containing the list of available plugins. The GUIClient method returns a client name. Such a client is executed when a method is launched in the Plug-Ins tab. The client usually shows a dialog with extra attributes for the user or group. The Restrictions method returns a hash with the restrictions for the plugin. For example, {"ldap => 1", "users" => 1} means that the plugin can be used only for LDAP users, so it will not be listed when editing a group or a no LDAP user.

A plugin usually provides more methods like Check, Add, AddBefore, etc.

List of Plugins

Currently there are only two YasT modules that implement plugins for yast2-users. As mentioned above, one is yast2-samba-server, and the other one is yast2-users itself. This is the complete list of current plugins:

  • yast-samba-server/src/modules/UsersPluginSamba.pm
  • yast-samba-server/src/modules/UsersPluginSambaGroups.pm
  • yast-users/src/modules/UsersPluginLDAPShadowAccount.pm
  • yast-users/src/modules/UsersPluginLDAPPasswordPolicy.pm
  • yast-users/src/modules/UsersPluginQuota.pm
  • yast-users/src/modules/UsersPluginKerberos.pm
  • yast-users/src/modules/UsersPluginLDAPAll.pm

All these plugins are written in Perl code, but they should be perfectly loaded in Ruby code thanks to YCP::Import. This would allow to rewrite some dialogs in Ruby code but still calling the existing plugins. Only note that plugins expect an user or group to be represented as a hash structure. Some glue code will be needed in order to convert an user/group object to a hash and the other way around.