Install plugin only in a specific platform (defined in package.json)

[jfoclpf]

Feature Request

Motivation Behind Feature

Many plugins do work only in a specific platform and crash in other platforms during build. Furthermore many plugins are specifically designed to a specific platform only, but their creators did not take that into account. There's also a popular request for this in Stackoverflow.

Feature Description

It would be very advantageous to have in package.json some sort of way to inform that we just want a specific plugin installed only in a specific platform, and not in all platforms.

For example something like this in package.json

  "cordova": {
    "plugins": {
      "cordova-plugin-mobile-ocr": {
         "platform-specific": ["android"]
       }
     }

Alternatives or Workarounds

We can use plugman but it's not reliable nor there is a way to tell other people that we want a certain plugin installed only on a specific platform. I suppose we can also use a hook, but I was wondering before which event should we consider to process. We can also have git branches with different versions of package.json for different platforms.

The best way would be undoubtedly to have that information directly stored in package.json.

[breautek]

I know this isn't very clean and not a permanent solution, but a plugin could be forked and the other implementations could be removed from the plugin.xml file.

[jfoclpf]

I can fork a plugin to remove a platform but then I will not fetch the updates the plugin's creator will eventually make for the platform where it does work.

Do you think this is doable and integratable with a hook? Which before event should I process? Is Cordova Cli based on node? If you want I can develop some hook in nodejs to implement this feature.

[breautek]

I'm not really sure what is involved... not exactly experienced with that of the Cordova codebase... but I think the hook idea is definitely worth a try.

Perhaps the before_plugin_install hook can be utilised for this and maybe you can modify the plugin.xml before Cordova consumes it to install it to the platforms. Hacky... but may work as a workaround.

https://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/10.x/guide/appdev/hooks/index.html

[jfoclpf]

Hi @breautek I know hooks, my projects have several hooks, but for now I just followed your tip and forked the plugin.

Perhaps the before_plugin_install hook can be utilised for this and maybe you can modify the plugin.xml before Cordova consumes it to install it to the platforms.

Yes, it seems the way to go, but is before_plugin_install also triggered upon cordova platform add <platform> when plugins are installed? I suppose so but I want to be sure.

If I develop such hook it would be nice to share it, is there any repository of those general tool hooks? Once I also developed a nice hook for example for having handlebars partials in html and not a single big HTML file, but there's no easy way to share it with others for them to integrate in their projects.