Redmine

I think, the first step should be a rake task which allows the following two options. It could possibly be coupled / integrated to your plugin directory :)

Installing¶

• Check the name (directory) of the plugin and complain if unexpected.
• Run all migrations
• perform rake tasks specific to the plugin (definable by the plugin itself)

Uninstalling¶

• Ask the user if she really want to do this, as it is going to delete all data
• Run the down migrations to version 0
• delete the code
  • Optionally, it could be renamed / moved. We could change the engines loader to ignore plugins which have a .disabled added

Also it is necessary to teach plugin authors to properly develop and test their down migrations.

Only disabling a plugin is not so easy. If you just keep disable the code but the database changes, you can face serious data inconsistencies if needed callbacks are not run. This should be only available if the plugin explicitly states that this is supported.

--Holger

Holger Just wrote:

• Ask the user if she really want to do this, as it is going to delete all data
• Run the down migrations to version 0

Make it very very very clear then, I just migrated one of my plugins to 0 on a test system because I had made changes to the latest migration, and boom all my hand-crafted test data was gone…

Felix Schäfer wrote:

Make it very very very clear then, I just migrated one of my plugins to 0 on a test system because I had made changes to the latest migration, and boom all my hand-crafted test data was gone…

We could have the massage in bold blinking red and have the user actually type in "Yes, I know what I'm doing."

On the other side, they are all Unix admins (except the Windows guys :). So they should know what they do all the time anyway.

--Holger

bold blinking red +1

:)

Interesting ideas!

It's not so complicated to install or uninstall a plugin now with our versions of rails and engines. I think we should first drop this useless "migrate_plugins" rake task and make it clear, in a wiki page, how to install/uninstall a plugin. It's just a "db:migrate NAME=blah VERSION=0" + remove the folder, nothing complicated behind.

Complications appear when you install a plugin, upgrade redmine, then try to uninstall it, if the plugin is incompatible with core database migrations, such as subtasking plugin. But I think we'll never find a good solution for that.

Muntek: about your idea of "one click installable plugins", the main challenge is the restart of application server. A redmine administrator is not necessarily the system administrator of the machine, or he may not have access to the machine immediately. In most cases, plugin installations won't have any effect if you don't restart the application, but uninstallations could lead to 500 errors everywhere.. I wonder if some other rails app (maybe radiant?) have a solution for that.

Sorry it's "db:migrate:plugin NAME=blah VERSION=0" of course.

Two years later, it's apparently now:

redmine:plugins:migrate NAME={plugin} VERSION=0

For example (actually using jruby, but all the same)

$ jruby -S rake db:migrate:plugin NAME=redmine_backlogs VERSION=0
Migrating redmine_backlogs (Redmine Backlogs)...

Note: The rake task db:migrate:plugin has been deprecated, please use the replacement version redmine:plugins:migrate

$ jruby -S rake redmine:plugins:migrate NAME=redmine_backlogs VERSION=0
Migrating redmine_backlogs (Redmine Backlogs)...

Thx, that's what i need now