An Accessory for Glad-I-Was-Here (PHP, Mariadb)

Introduction

To demonstrate how Accessories work, we created a simple plugin for the PHP/MySQL version that adds a footer to the Glad-I-Was-Here front page.

If you have not already read through Glad-I-Was-Here (PHP, Mariadb), we recommend you do so first as we’ll only discuss things in this section that were not covered before.

To obtain the source code:

% git clone https://gitlab.com/ubos/ubos-toyapps

Go to subdirectory gladiwashere-php-mysql-footer.

Package lifecycle and App deployment

Like all other Apps and Accessories on UBOS including Hello World, gladiwashere-php-mysql-footer is built with makepkg, installed with pacman and deployed with ubos-admin:

% makepkg -f
% sudo pacman -U gladiwashere-php-mysql-footer-*-any.pkg.tar.xz
% sudo ubos-admin createsite

Specify gladiwashere-php-mysql as the name of the App, and then specify gladiwashere-php-mysql-footer as the (only) Accessory.

Manifest JSON

Let’s examine this Accessory’s UBOS Manifest file. It is similar to an App’s, but much simpler (that is common for Accessories. It also has an extra entry accessoryinfo entry that relates the Accessory to the App it belongs to:

{
    "type"  : "accessory",

    "accessoryinfo" : {
        "appid"         : "gladiwashere-php-mysql",
        "accessoryid"   : "footer"
    },

    "roles" : {
        "apache2" : {
            "appconfigitems" : [
                {
                    "type" : "file",
                    "name" : "footer.php",
                    "template"     : "tmpl/footer.php.tmpl",
                    "templatelang" : "varsubst"
                }
            ]
        }
    },
    "customizationpoints" : {
        "message" : {
            "name"     : "message",
            "type"     : "string",
            "required" : true
        }
    }
}

The apache2 role functions just like in case of an App. It takes file tmpl/footer.php.tmpl from the code base, and putx it into the root directory of the App’s deployment as footer.php after having replaced variables in it.

What variables? Well, this template file reads as follows:

<div class="footer">
 <hr/>
 <h4>Footer, from the <tt>gladiwashere-php-mysql-footer</tt> accessory.</h4>
 <p>Message you entered as customization point: &quot;${installable.customizationpoints.message.value}&quot;</p>
 <hr/>
</div>

You see the variable ${installable.customizationpoints.message.value}, which refers to the value of customization point message. If you deployed the Accessory with ubos-admin createsite, it will have asked you for the value of this Customization Point, and the value you provided will be inserted.

Which brings us to the last part of the manifest: the declaration of that Customization Point with data type string.

Note that both Apps and Accessories may (or may not) have any number of Customization Points. Customization Points are not special to Accessories, it’s just the first place in the example Apps where we have used one.