EMG can be installed using NPM from the public NPMjs.com repo but EMG plugins need to be installed manually.

[asnowfix]

Problem Statement

Each EMG plugins needs to be installed (or linked to) <EDGEMICRO_HOME>/plugins. A plugin is made (at a minimum) of a package.json and an index.js, which makes it looking like a legitimate NPM module.

In order to integrate an EMG custom plugin as a real legitimate NPM module (from the public NPMjs.com or from a private NPM registry), one need to install it & then symlink it into the EMG plugins folder…

$ npm install -g my-npm-module
$ cd <EDGEMICRO_HOME>/plugins
$ ln -s <NPM-PATH>/my-npm-module my-emg-plugin

...and finally edit the ~/.edgemicro/<org>-<env>-config.yaml to insert it into the plugins: list.

  plugins:
    sequence:
      - oauth
      - my-emg-plugin

These are multiple operations, both at NPM, Shell & configuration level. They could be made simpler (and less OS-specific) using only NPM & EMG configuration.

Possible Solutions

1. Use the NPM module resolver (load them using require(‘my-emg-plugin’) as a fallback for plugins not found into <EDGEMICRO_HOME>/plugins.
2. Add a manual mapping between NPM modules and EMG plugin names in ~/.edgemicro/<org>-<env>-config.yaml, like (for example) the below.
3. Download custom plugin & its configuration from Edge Cloud (much like Edge Cloud Call-Out policies)

  plugins:
    npm:
      - my-emg-plugin
        my-npm-module
      - my-other-emg-plugin
        my-other-npm-module
    sequence:
      - oauth
      - my-emg-plugin

Recommendation

Proposal (2) above adds more information in the configuration file, but gives complete control to the developer of the NPM module names (eg. can adopt a naming convention to differentiate them from other general purpose NPM modules like ‘edgemicro-plugin-my-logic’) and the EMG plugin name (eg. ‘my-logic’)