kandev/docs/public/plugins.md

title, description, status

title	description	status
Plugins	Install and manage kandev plugins: Go backends kandev spawns and supervises, with an optional native frontend bundle.	experimental

Plugins

Plugins extend kandev without forking core: a plugin ships a Go backend that kandev spawns and supervises as a subprocess over a strict typed gRPC protocol, and can optionally ship a native frontend bundle that kandev loads into the SPA. This page covers what plugins are, how to install and manage them, and the current security posture. To discover and install plugins from the in-app catalog, see the Plugin marketplace. For building a plugin, see Authoring a plugin. For the manifest schema, see Plugin manifest reference.

Plugins are an operator-level, instance-wide capability — there is no per-user plugin access. They are gated behind the plugins feature flag (Settings > System > Feature Toggles), off by default in production builds and on by default in dev/e2e builds. Enabling the flag requires a backend restart and surfaces Settings > Plugins in the sidebar.

How it works

Kandev owns the whole process lifecycle: it extracts the package, spawns the binary, completes the go-plugin handshake, health-checks it (Ping every 30s), and restarts it on crash or repeated health-check failure (backoff, max 5 attempts). There is no separate operator-managed plugin process to run or babysit — install a package and kandev does the rest.

A native UI bundle can register a nav item that renders as a top-level sidebar entry or, when it declares itself part of the Integrations section, alongside kandev's first-party integration links in the main sidebar's Integrations section — expect new entries to appear there once such a plugin is installed and active. Bundles can also inject components into host-defined slots, including icon buttons in the chat composer toolbar (beside the model picker, mic, and send button), so an active plugin can add its own action right where you message an agent. A bundle can also declare keybindings (user-overridable at Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts, with core shortcuts always winning on a conflict) and open host-owned modal windows from anywhere in its code — see Authoring a plugin for both.

Global Status contributions

Native UI bundles can also add compact, live status UI on every hosted route:

function StatusContribution({ slotProps }) {
  return host.jsx(
    "span",
    null,
    `${slotProps.presentation}: ${slotProps.activeTaskId ?? "no task"}`,
  );
}

registry.registerComponent("app-status-bar-left", StatusContribution);
registry.registerComponent("app-status-bar-right", StatusContribution);

Each registration is one opaque item in Kandev's 24 px desktop/tablet status bar and phone Status drawer. The slot chooses its default side; users can Cmd/Ctrl plus mouse-drag items across the desktop spacer, and Kandev preserves their order in backend user settings. Phone shows the saved left sequence followed by the right sequence, with no drag ordering. slotProps includes placement, presentation, density, pathname, activeWorkspaceId, activeTaskId, and activeSessionId. Only one presentation mounts at once; adapt each contribution for both compact bar and touch-friendly drawer use. Kandev does not inspect or reorder children inside a contribution, and disabled plugins return to their saved position when re-enabled. Full-bleed routes that opt out of host topbar chrome own their Status trigger.

Installing a plugin

The easiest way to install is from the in-app catalog — Settings > Plugins > Browse, then Install on a card (see the Plugin marketplace). To install a plugin that is not in a configured catalog, open Settings > Plugins and click Install plugin. You can install from a URL (kandev downloads the tarball) or by uploading a .tar.gz file directly. No credentials are ever shown or copied — installing a plugin has nothing to reveal, unlike a webhook-secret/API-key registration flow.

The same operations are available over HTTP:

# Install from a URL
curl -X POST http://localhost:38429/api/plugins/install \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com/acme-tools-1.0.0.tar.gz"}'

# Install by uploading a local tarball
curl -X POST http://localhost:38429/api/plugins/install \
  -F "package=@acme-tools-1.0.0.tar.gz"

Either path runs the same pipeline:

1. Verify checksums.txt covers every other file in the tarball and every hash matches (always enforced).
2. Check for checksums.txt.sig. Signature verification is not currently wired up, so every package — signed or not — installs and is reported as unsigned today (see "Signed vs. unsigned packages" below).
3. Parse and validate manifest.yaml before any code runs: schema, id pattern, the categories and UI-surface enums, and that runtime.executables contains an entry for the host's OS/arch.
4. Extract to ~/.kandev/plugins/<id>/<version>/ and record the installation.
5. Spawn the platform-matched binary and complete the go-plugin handshake. Status is registered while this is pending, active once the handshake succeeds, or error if spawn/handshake fails (the operator can retry via Enable).

A successful install that failed to spawn returns HTTP 201 with a warning field rather than failing outright — the package is installed, just not yet running.

Once installed, the plugin appears in the list with its category, a status badge (active), a signing badge (unsigned today), and Disable and Uninstall actions:

Filesystem sideload and Sync

Besides install-by-URL/upload, an operator with shell access to the host can place plugin content directly under ~/.kandev/plugins/ without going through the install endpoint. The Sync button in Settings > Plugins (and POST /api/plugins/sync) reconciles kandev's registry with what is actually on disk:

• A dropped directory — ~/.kandev/plugins/<id>/<version>/manifest.yaml placed manually with no existing record — is validated and registered with status disabled, never auto-enabled. Directory sideloads skip the checksum/integrity gate the URL/upload pipeline runs, so an operator must explicitly inspect and enable one. If more than one version directory exists for the same unregistered id, the lexically greatest version is registered and the others are reported as skipped.
• A dropped tarball — any *.tar.gz sitting directly in ~/.kandev/plugins/ — is run through the same verified install pipeline POST /api/plugins/install uses. On success the tarball file is deleted; on failure it is left in place and the failure is reported.
• A missing install — a registered record whose install_path no longer exists on disk — is stopped (if running) and marked error.

At boot, kandev runs only the directory-sideload and missing-install steps (never the tarball-install step), as part of resuming plugins that were already active. This is conservative by design: starting up never spawns a binary an operator hasn't explicitly approved via install or Sync.

Enable, disable, uninstall

• Disable stops the subprocess. Config and state are preserved; no events or webhooks are delivered while disabled.
• Enable respawns the subprocess and re-completes the handshake.
• Uninstall stops the subprocess and deletes the plugin's package, registration record, and all persisted state — there is no grace period.

Per-plugin settings

A plugin can declare config_schema in its manifest, generating a settings form at Settings > Plugins > <plugin> (also GET /api/plugins/{id}/config and PATCH /api/plugins/{id}). Fields marked secret: true or format: "password" (for example a GitHub PAT) are never returned in cleartext to the operator UI — reads show a masked placeholder, and resubmitting the form unchanged leaves the stored secret alone. The plugin process itself receives the real values via the GetConfig Host RPC. Saving config restarts the running plugin so it re-reads its config. <id>.config.yml on disk is written with mode 0600 and may hold vault references rather than cleartext for secret fields.

A plugin can also render its own UI inline on this page — at the top, above the settings form — via the plugin-settings slot, for example a live integration-health card ("CLI installed ✅ v0.45.2", "API token ✅ authenticated"). This is owner-scoped, so a plugin's card only ever appears on its own settings page. See Named slots in the authoring guide.

Signed vs. unsigned packages

Every package's checksums.txt is verified at install time — this integrity gate is always enforced. Signing (checksums.txt.sig, an ed25519 signature over checksums.txt) is a separate, optional layer, and its verification hook is not currently wired up in the shipped product: no signature is cryptographically checked today, so every install — signed tarball or not — is currently treated and reported as unsigned. A signed package installs identically to an unsigned one; signing is not required in v1.

On-disk layout

~/.kandev/plugins/
├── <id>.yml                    # registration record (status, install_path, signed, ...)
├── <id>.config.yml             # operator-editable config (PATCH /api/plugins/{id})
└── <id>/
    ├── <version>/              # extracted package (InstallPath)
    │   ├── manifest.yaml
    │   ├── server/plugin-<goos>-<goarch>[.exe]
    │   └── ui/bundle.js         # optional
    └── data/                    # KANDEV_PLUGIN_DATA_DIR — shared across versions

Security posture

• Auth is the spawn relationship. Kandev spawns the plugin subprocess itself over a unix domain socket (macOS/Linux) or loopback TCP (Windows) — never a routable network address — and secures it in both cases with the go-plugin handshake plus AutoMTLS. There is no api_key, webhook_secret, or HMAC signing anywhere in the contract.
• Capability-based access control. A plugin can only call the Host RPCs it declared in its manifest: state gates the state RPCs, secrets gates the plugin-owned secret RPCs, and each read-only data accessor (tasks, sessions, workspaces, workflows, agent profiles, repositories) is gated individually via api_read:<resource> (write access, api_write:<resource>, is reserved but not yet implemented). An undeclared capability returns gRPC PermissionDenied with a message naming the missing capability, checked by a server interceptor before the handler runs. GetConfig and EmitEvent are the only ungated RPCs — a plugin can always read its own config (secrets included) and emit events.
• Native UI plugins run in-origin with full app-store access. This is an accepted tradeoff, not an oversight: a plugin bundle shares the kandev React instance and Zustand store so it can build UI indistinguishable from first-party pages. In v1 only active, operator-installed plugins load; a failing bundle or initialize is caught and never breaks boot; slot components render behind error boundaries. Hard sandboxing (a worker or realm boundary) is explicit future work — see below.
• Package integrity is always checked; signing is optional. See "Signed vs. unsigned packages" above.
• Curated marketplace, no auto-install. The Plugin marketplace adds one-click install from a catalog, but the official source is PR-curated (a plugin appears only after a maintainer approves it), install is always an explicit operator action, and updates require an explicit click — there is no automatic discovery or background install. kandev collects no download or usage telemetry.

Related: Authoring a plugin, Plugin manifest reference, and Extending Kandev.