Server Plugins

As of version 1.5.0, OpenTAKServer includes a plugin system.

Like OpenTAKServer, plugins are made using Python’s Flask framework. Specifically, plugins are Flask Blueprints.

Plugins classes must be a subclass of opentakserver.plugins.Plugin.Plugin

Plugins can be created by making a new repository from OTS-Plugin-Template. See the screenshot below.

_images/ots-plugin-template.png

Web UI

Plugins can optionally include a web UI that will be displayed in an iframe in OpenTAKServer’s UI. Plugin UIs are written in the Mantine react framework. To start a new plugin UI, create a new repo from the OTS-UI-Plugin-Template. The UI repo should be separate from the plugin’s repo. See the SkyFi Plugin’s UI for an example.

When building your plugin’s UI, it’s assumed that your code is in ~/Webstorm Projects/Your-OTS-Plugin-UI and your plugin is at ~/PyCharm Projects/Your-OTS-Plugin. The npm build command will automatically put the built UI files in ~/PyCharm Projects/Your-OTS-Plugin/ui. If your code is in another directory, edit the outDir option in your UI’s vite.config.mjs file

Licensing

Plugins that are publicly distributed must use the GPLv3 or another compatible license.

Public Repo

While plugins can be distributed or kept private as the author chooses, there is a public plugin repo available. Plugins on this repo will be accepted after a code review to make sure it meets the plugin requirements, works as intended, and doesn’t contain any malicious code. Once accepted, OpenTAKServer users will be able to install plugins from this repo from within the web UI. The repo can be browsed at https://repo.opentakserver.io.

Development

While any IDE can be used for development, this guide will focus on PyCharm for the plugin and Webstorm for the UI. Both PyCharm and Webstorm have free versions which can be used.

Poetry

Poetry is used to build, package, and version plugins, as well as manage dependencies.

Versioning

Poetry Dynamic Versioning is used to version plugins based on git tags. When a new version of your plugin is ready to be released, a new git tag should be created with the plugin version using Semantic Versioning. For example, the first version tag could be 1.0.0. Then when building the plugin for distribution using the poetry build command, the sdist and wheel files will be automatically tagged with this version number.

Start Developing Your Plugin

The things that need to be changed are marked with TODO comments in OTS-Plugin-Template and OTS-UI-Plugin-Template.

  1. pyproject.toml
    1. Set the name, description, author information, and URLs

      *. The name must start with OTS-

    2. Change the include option under [tool.poetry] to the name of the folder that contains your plugin’s code

    3. Do the same for tool.poetry-dynamic-versioning.files

  2. app.py

    1. Change the class name

    2. Change the name of the blueprint from PluginTemplate to your plugin’s name

    3. Add API routes as necessary. Remember to protect your routes using the @auth_required or @roles_accepted decorators

    4. Edit the activate() method if your plugin needs to run in the background. For example, the AISStream plugin uses the activate() method to connect to AISStream’s servers to pull data.

  3. default_config.py

    1. Rename OTS_PLUGIN_TEMPLATE_ENABLED to your plugin’s name

    2. Add config options as necessary

    3. Edit the validate() method to validate user input

  4. README.md

    *. Make sure your plugin includes a README.md file in markdown format. This will be shown to users in the OTS web UI