How to solve inter-plugin dependencies

lzap · September 16, 2021, 6:01pm

Hey,

with puppet extraction, foreman discovery now depends on foreman_puppet.

How are we going to solve plugin inter-dependencies long term?

And short term, how do I solve problem of loading FactoryBot definitions or other sources? This is what discovery does:

FactoryBot.definition_file_paths << File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'factories')
FactoryBot.reload

Any advice?

aruzicka · September 17, 2021, 6:34am

This isn’t really new, a lot of plugins already have dependencies between each other. For example ansible depends on rex, rex depends on tasks.

This is what we do in REX to make tasks factories available

github.com

theforeman/foreman_remote_execution/blob/master/test/test_plugin_helper.rb#L8

    
      
          # This calls the main test_helper in Foreman-core
          require 'test_helper'
          require 'dynflow/testing'
          
          
# Add plugin to FactoryBot's paths
          FactoryBot.definition_file_paths << File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'factories')
          # Add foreman tasks factories too
          FactoryBot.definition_file_paths << "#{ForemanTasks::Engine.root}/test/factories"
          FactoryBot.reload

lzap · September 17, 2021, 7:23am

Oh cool, I could not find Engine.root, great.

What’s probably new tho is a weak dependency. Discovery has to work with or without Puppet plugin installed. But I can create an if-statement.

aruzicka · September 17, 2021, 9:03am

Katello has a weak dependency on rex. There are large chunks of code hidden behind Katello.with_remote_execution? so this seems to be the way to go.