Custom table interface for browsing and installing plugins

[simonw]

Here's a fun idea: what if the list of plugins you could install was a very lightly customized Datasette table? Would get search and faceting for free, and help people further understand what the tool can be used for.

An in-memory plugins database which is deliberately excluded from the homepage.

Originally posted by @simonw in simonw/datasette-app#74 (comment)

[simonw]

There are a few pieces to this then.

• The datasette-app-support plugin should hit this API https://datasette.io/content/plugins.json?_shape=array on startup to fetch the list of available plugins (or maybe it should hit it when the user navigates to the plugins/directory page?)
• To allow for facet by installed/not-installed it should include information about which plugins are installed in that in-memory database
• A custom table template should help make that page look a bit like https://datasette.io/plugins
• Some kind of mechanism by which the app can inject "install this plugin" buttons - but only if the user is authenticated as "root"

[simonw]

I may borrow the purple button design from https://datasette.io/desktop (a smaller version) for the "install this plugin" buttons.

[simonw]

Adding a "Desktop compatible" facet would be really useful here - any plugin that depends on configuration (like dogsheep-beta) is currently incompatible with Datasette Desktop, and if you order by number of stars you get a lot of those first: https://datasette.io/plugins?sort=stars

[simonw]

If it's going to fetch the plugin directory on startup, it needs to survive network errors.

[simonw]

I want to be able to display the full readme for a plugin but only on-demand, not pre-loaded on startup. So there will probably be some JavaScript that hits https://datasette.io/content/repos.json?_sort=id&full_name__exact=simonw%2Fdatasette-leaflet-geojson&_col=readme_html&_labels=on&_shape=array

[simonw]

Here's what I have so far:

[simonw]

Need to figure out what happens when you click that button - should it show a loading indicator of some sort? Also ideally it would refresh the page once the plugin has finished installing (and the server has restarted) which would update the "currently installed" state on that page.

[simonw]

This is making the tests fail because the named in-memory database persists between tests in pytest.