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05. Plugin Lifecycle

1. Goals

Define the complete state machine from discovery to uninstall, guaranteeing:

  • Predictable behavior
  • Recoverable failures
  • Auditable start/stop
  • Consistency with command palette / AgentTool registration

2. State machine

discovered
 → validated
 → installed
 → enabled
 → loaded
 → running
 → load_error
 → disabled
 → install_error
 → invalid

State descriptions

State Meaning
discovered Plugin directory or package scanned
validated manifest / file integrity passed
installed Written to the installed directory and registered
enabled Enabled by the user, allowed to load
loaded Runtime loaded, contribution points registered
running Has an active panel / background logic
disabled Installed but turned off by the user
load_error Load failed after enabling
install_error Install failed
invalid Validation failed, unusable

3. Lifecycle hooks

Implemented today: the runtime (apps/desktop/electron/main/plugin-runtime.ts) invokes onLoad (when a plugin is loaded on load/enable) and onUnload (dispatched into the plugin process on unload/disable/reload/app quit, 5s budget — 1.5s on quit — then the process is stopped); unloading tears down the plugin's registered commands and tools. The other hooks below are declared in the API but not yet fired.

Planned: once the full lifecycle lands, hooks fire in this order:

  1. onInstall (once, only after a successful install)
  2. onEnable
  3. onLoad
  4. runtime events
  5. onUnload
  6. onDisable
  7. onUninstall

Invocation constraints

  • Hooks must be able to time out (default 5s, configurable)
  • A hook exception must not crash the host
  • If onLoad fails, enter load_error and automatically roll back the contribution points already registered

3.1 Resident services

A service declared in contributes.services is driven by the host, not by the plugin's own hooks, so its window is strictly inside the plugin's lifetime:

  1. onLoad completes and contribution points are registered
  2. For each declared service (at most 4 per plugin, gated on background.service), the broker calls service.start in the plugin process with a 5s budget. A start failure marks that one service failed and leaves the rest of the plugin loaded.
  3. On unload / disable / reload, service.stop runs before onUnload, so the service is quiet while the plugin still has its API

Status per service is starting | running | stopped | failed plus a restart count, readable over the plugin IPC surface and shown on the Plugins page.

Restart policy

The service lives in the plugin's host process, so a crash takes it with the process. The supervisor then restarts the whole plugin:

  • Backoff 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s, 16s, capped at 30s
  • At most 5 restarts; after that the plugin stays down in failed so the user sees the failure instead of a silent crash loop
  • A process that survives 60s is considered healthy and the backoff resets to zero
  • autoRestart: false on a service opts its plugin out of restarts entirely
  • Restarts are skipped when the user re-enabled or removed the plugin while the backoff timer was pending

Manual enable / disable always wins over the supervisor: an explicit action clears the pending timer and the attempt counter.

App quit

Quitting stops every plugin host as a shutdown, not as a crash. Each plugin is marked as disposing and its pending restarts are cancelled before anything else, then services stop and onUnload runs, in parallel across plugins.

This is what separates the two exits: a host process that dies without being marked is reported as a crash, which means an error log, a "stopped unexpectedly" toast, and a supervisor scheduling restarts into an app that is closing. None of that may happen on a clean quit.

A crash report carries the diagnosis. The crash path reports the host process's exit code because on Windows a hard fault (0xC0000005 and friends, which Electron hands over as a negative signed int) and a plugin's own process.exit(1) are different bugs. The exit code reaches the load error, the failed service state, the plugin.crash audit record and the plugin log channel. Plugin stdout/stderr is not copied into the crash report because it may contain workspace data or secrets. Nothing new is persisted, and no new permission or API surface is involved.

The sequence is bounded — onUnload gets 1.5s per plugin and teardown 3s in total, after which the children are killed outright. A plugin's cleanup must never be the reason the app appears to hang on quit.

4. Enable / disable semantics

enable

  • Set state to enabled
  • Attempt load
  • Success: register commands / tools / skills / themes / MCP servers, then start resident services
  • Failure: automatically fall back to disabled and surface the error to the user. This is frozen by D017 (enable→load failure auto-disables the plugin).

disable

  • Unregister commands / tools
  • Close panel
  • Stop resident services and disconnect MCP servers
  • Cancel any pending restart backoff
  • Call onUnload / onDisable
  • Persist as disabled

5. Startup recovery

On app startup:

  1. Scan installed plugins
  2. Read the enabled state
  3. Load only enabled plugins
  4. Skip a single failed plugin without affecting other plugins or the main app

6. Developer mode

dev-loaded plugins:

  • Not copied to installed
  • Reference the local path directly
  • Can watch and hot reload
  • Reload flow: unload → validate → load

On hot reload:

  • Preserve plugin settings as much as possible
  • Panel in-memory state is not guaranteed to be preserved

7. Contribution-point register/unregister transaction

Each plugin's load process should be approximately transactional:

begin
 register commands
 register tools
 register skills
 register themes
 register MCP servers (lazy connect)
commit
 start resident services

On mid-way failure:

rollback all registrations from this plugin

Avoid a half-loaded state where "the command exists but the tool does not".

8. Audit events

Record at least:

  • plugin.install
  • plugin.uninstall
  • plugin.enable
  • plugin.disable
  • plugin.load.success
  • plugin.load.error
  • plugin.unload
  • plugin.crash
  • plugin.service.start / plugin.service.stop
  • plugin.service.restart / plugin.service.restart.scheduled
  • plugin.services.skipped (missing permission or over the per-plugin cap)

Fields:

  • pluginId
  • version
  • source (installed | dev | marketplace)
  • ts
  • errorCode?
  • attempt? / delayMs? (service restarts)
  • exitCode? (crash), exitCodeHex? (Windows hard fault)

9. Uninstall strategy

Before uninstall:

  1. disable + unload
  2. Call onUninstall
  3. Delete installed files
  4. Clean up plugin-private data (may ask the user whether to keep it)

Default recommendation:

  • Clean up settings/data on uninstall (D016: uninstall deletes plugin data by default)
  • Provide a "keep data" advanced option (can be deferred)