Design some kind of plugin system for bunnylol

[alichtman]

I don't know if it's sustainable or desirable to keep adding commands to the central repo.

I think providing a plugin-like system would be really cool, so you could enable commands provided by other github repos in your config. Or a simple string replacement redirect service, like:

{
   "alias": "https://customwebsite.com/?search=%s",
   ...
}

I haven't come up with a great design yet

[jrodal98]

Perhaps some inspiration for this ticket:

I've been running a bunnylol clone for 5 years and manage commands like this: https://github.com/jrodal98/brunnylol/blob/master/commands.yml

E.g. stuff like

- alias: yt
  url: https://www.youtube.com
  command: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query={}
  description: Search youtube

• yt: takes you to the url
• yt <input>: inserts input into command and takes you to that url

- alias: gh
  url: https://github.com/jrodal98
  command: https://github.com/{}
  description: Go to jrodal98's github page or go to another repo (e.g. jrodal98/brunnylol)
  encode: false

• Same as yt example but it doesn't do url encoding

- alias: aoc
  url: https://adventofcode.com
  description: Advent of code
  nested:
    - alias: r
      url: https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/
      description: reddit
    - alias: j
      url: https://github.com/jrodal98/advent-of-code
      command: https://github.com/jrodal98/advent-of-code/blob/master/py2024/day{}/solution.py
      description: jrodal98 AOC solutions

• aoc: takes you to adventofcode.com
• aoc r: takes you to the subreddit
• aoc j: takes you to my advent of code github repo
• aoc j 25: takes you to the day 25 solution for 2024

---

At server initialization time, the yaml file is parsed into a map of aliases -> "commands": https://github.com/jrodal98/brunnylol/blob/master/src/main.rs#L85

---

I don't think this is a perfect solution but it does make it so that can generate any bookmark I need with just plaintext, which would be best for a plugin system. I don't think I've touched the source code in 4 years. But I am discouraged from actually changing anything because it requires me to restart my server and I can't be bothered to do that.

Personally, if I had the energy to redo all of this:

1. I'd update this syntax to support using the string_pipeline crate to help format the URLs: https://docs.rs/string_pipeline/latest/string_pipeline/
2. I'd want a web UI where I could create new bookmarks and they'd be persisted in a database somewhere so that I never have to update my file, my docker image, or restart my server. (not relevant to this issue but perhaps could be another feature request)
3. If I wanted to add plugins, I'd hope I could also just point to a json or yaml or toml file from a webUI and have it take effect without needing to restart my server.

[alichtman]

I just merged #47 (more expressive user bindings) and #48 (hot reloading of the config), which puts a nice dent in this ticket. Let me know what you think @jrodal98!

I'd want a web UI where I could create new bookmarks and they'd be persisted in a database somewhere so that I never have to update my file, my docker image, or restart my server. (not relevant to this issue but perhaps could be another feature request)

This would still be really nice to have.