All, We've needed the elusive extension registry for quite some time now, and with NiFi Registry I think we are in a good place to make some progress in this area.
I've started looking into adding "extension bundles" to NiFi Registry as the next type of versioned item, along side the existing versioned flows, and I wanted to take a minute to outline how that approach could work before getting too far into it. Also, I'd like to focus this discussion on the design and functionality of the extension registry, and not on how the community is going to use it. Topics like hosting a central registry, changing the build process, restructuring the git repo, releasing NARs, etc, are all important topics, but first we need an extension registry before we can do any of that :) Here is a high-level description of what needs to be done... NiFi Registry - Add a new type of item called an extension bundle, where each bundle can contain one ore extensions or APIs - Support bundles for traditional NiFi (aka NARs) and also bundles for MiNiFi CPP - Ability to upload the binary artifact for a bundle and extract the metadata about the bundle, and metadata about the extensions contained in the bundle (more on this later) - Provide a pluggable storage provider for saving the content of each extension bundle so that we can have different implementations like local fileysystem, S3, and other object stores - Provide a REST API for listing and retrieving available bundles, integrate this into the registry Java client and NiFi CLI NAR Maven Plugin - Generate a descriptor for each component in the NAR which will provide information like the description, tags, restricted or not, etc. - These descriptors will be parsed by NiFi Registry when a NAR is being uploaded so that NiFi Registry will know about the extensions contained with in the NAR NiFi - Provide some type of extension manager experience where users can search, browse, & install bundles that are available in any of the registry clients that have been defined - Introduce a new security policy to control which users are allowed to access the extension manager - Installing a bundle should load the NAR and make the extensions available leveraging the recent work done to auto-load new NARs - Importing versioned flows from registry should provide an easy way to install bundles that are required by the flow, but missing from the local NiFi instance If anyone has any thoughts or concerns about this approach, please let me know. Thanks, Bryan
