lpetrov / pluginbus

Simple Plugin Architecture for NodeJS projects

pluginbus

Simple Plugin Architecture for NodeJS projects.

Features planned (not ready yet) for v1.0:

• Simple, plug-and-play usage, based on NPM packages
• Auto discovery of plugins
• Plugin lifecycle events
• Flexible configurations (default general config, plugin specific config, user specific config overrides)
• Add support for unit tests of plugins
• Event bus - the main mechanism for communication between plugins/main app (distributed architecture - no direct dependencies between plugins)
  • One main event bus for communicating between plugins
  • Pub/sub-like mechanism for dynamic/filtered/wildcard event subscriptions
• Asynchronous APIs (using Native Promises, e.g. async/await)
• Last, but not least - optimized for performance

Some day ideas:

• In-browser interoperability
• WebSockets/UDP/TCP/HTTP/HTTPS/Unix Socket/Named Pipe/Shared Memory/... transport layers

Installation

npm install pluginbus

Usage

Main App

let PluginBus = require('./pluginbus.js');

(async() => {
    let pluginBus = new PluginBus();
    await pluginBus.autodetect();
    await pluginBus.init();
    // this file -> HelloWorld plugin -> HelloWorldPeer plugin
    pluginBus.trigger('hello', 'WORLD!');
})();

Plugins

Plugins are just NodeJS modules that export a function that takes a PluginBus instance as an argument. The function should return an object with a constructor(pluginBusInstance, configObject) and init(). The constructor method is called when the plugin is loaded.

The init method is called when the plugin system is initialized.

For examples, see examples/ folder.