Plugin manager

You can manage your Digital.ai Release plugins directly from the Digital.ai Release user interface. The Plugin Manager displays the list of installed plugins and their current version. The Plugin Manager lets you:

  1. Search and install plugins from the Browse tab.
  2. Upgrade an existing plugin. Shows an Upgrade button for plugins that are installed already and lets you upgrade the plugins whenever a new version is available from the Browse tab.
  3. Upload a new plugin or a new version of an already installed plugin, that is, the Installed tab’s Upload new plugin file.

The Plugins tab is accessible only to the Admin user. To use the plugin manager, click Plugins in the top menu bar.You can view a list of all the installed plugins in Digital.ai Release under the Installed tab.

Important: All the official Digital.ai plugins are displayed on the Browse tab of the plugin manager. Ensure that you are connected to the network to see all the official Digital.ai Release plugins on the Browse tab.

View and install an official Digital.ai Release plugin

To install a plug-in:

  1. On the top navigation bar, click Plugins and then click Browse tab.
  2. Click Install now on the respective plugin that you would like to install. Any time you wish to cancel the installation process when the installation process is ongoing, click Cancel installation. This action cancels the installation process.
  3. Whenever a new version is available for a plugin that is installed already, the plugin card for the plugin shows an Upgrade button and lets you upgrade the plugin.
  4. You can also use the Search function to search for a plugin and then install.
  5. Restart Digital.ai Release to finish the plugin installation process.

Plugins Manager

Upload a new plugin

To upload a new plugin or a new version of an existing plugin, do the following steps:

  1. Click Plugins from the top navigation bar and select the Installed tab.
  2. Click Upload new plugin file, browse and select .jar plugin you want to upload.
  3. Restart your Digital.ai Release instance after uploading a new plugin to complete the upload procedure.

Run the following command to restart Digital.ai Release: Linux: run.sh or Windows: run.cmd

Test that plugins are installed correctly

In Digital.ai Release there are two types of plugins: a plugin that is visible through the UI, and a plugin that is a background process with no UI. The following procedures describes the steps to test if a plugin is installed correctly.

Verify that a plugin with a UI is installed correctly

  1. In the top navigation bar, click Plugins and Installed.
  2. Verify that the plugin is installed by browsing the list of installed plugins.
  3. In the top navigation bar, click Dashboards.
  4. Verify that the plugin has a tile and a default description.
  5. In the top navigation bar, click Settings and then Task access.
  6. Verify that the plugin related types are listed.

Verify that a plugin with no UI is installed correctly

  1. In the top navigation bar, click Settings and Shared configuration.
  2. Find the plugin that you want to test and click New shared Configuration button.
  3. Fill out the required fields.
  4. Click Test.

If you find that a plugin is not installed correctly, remove and re-install the plugin. If the plugin is not installed correctly even after re-installing, contact Digital.ai Support.

Remove a plugin

Use the Plugin Manager CLI to delete plugins.

  1. Officially supported plugins are installed in /plugins/xlr-official/ directory.
  2. Custom plugins that you upload are installed in /plugins/local/ directory.

Important: Do not delete the xlr-official folder. The Digital.ai Supported plugins are downloaded to this folder from the plugin manager.

  1. Shut down the Release server.

    Operating system Shortcut
    Microsoft Windows Ctrl + c
    Unix-based systems Ctrl + c
  2. You can delete Digital.ai Release plugins with the plugin manager CLI from the database and the filesystem. Refer Plugin Manager CLI for more information.
  3. You can delete Digital.ai Release plugins with the plugin manager command-line interface (CLI) from the database or filesystem. Refer Plugin Manager CLI for more information.

Configure proxy for plugin manager

If the Digital.ai Release server uses a proxy to connect to the internet, the plugin manager cannot install a plugin from the GUI. The plugin manager must access the https://plugins.xebialabs.com/nexus/ URL to fetch the plugins.

To configure the proxy settings for the plugin manager, add the following configuration to the conf/xl-release.conf file:

xl {
  database {
  }
  reporting {
  }
  features.plugins.servers.xebialabs-plugins.proxy {
                host = "proxy.example.com"
                port = 8888
                credentials{
                username = "user"
                password = "password"
              }
  }
}

Plugin Manager CLI

Limited plugin management is available through CLI integrated into the server. Refer Plugin Manager CLI for more information.

Plugin storage

Plugins are stored in the database and users should access them through the GUI and CLI.

  1. Cover the folders /plugins/xlr-official/` etc
  2. Cover the fact that the plugins are installed both on the database and the filesystem
  3. Cover the fact that you should no longer add or delete files directly to the filesystem.
  4. Cover the fact that on a cluster setup, you must install the plugin to a master server, and then go to each other node in the cluster, restart the nodes to have the new plugins auto-installed in those nodes from the database.
WARNING: All manual file operations such as copying, renaming, moving, removing, and so on is strictly not allowed inside the plugins folder.

For more information, see Plugin synchronization

Wrapper file changes

From Digital.ai Release version 10.2.0 and later, classpath entries for plugins is removed from the xlr-wrapper-linux.conf and xlr-wrapper-windows.conf.

Important: When upgrading to Digital.ai Release 10.2.0 and later, if you have custom entries in the wrapper files, do not include any folders that contain plugins and plugin hotfixes.

Hotfix folder structure changes

From Digital.ai Release version 10.2.0 and later hotfix folder structure has changed. Core hotfixes need to be placed in hotfix/lib folder and plugin hotfixes in hotfix/plugins.