The OPNsense Plugins System Situation

[Majx]

I would first like to thank the OPNsense team for all of their hard work and the consistent support they provide to the community.

I'm not sure whether this topic has been discussed before. I searched the forum but couldn't find a clear discussion about it. If this has already been addressed, I would appreciate being pointed to the relevant resources.

Introduction

Many of us invest our free time developing plugins for OPNsense.

From what I have observed, there are currently two ways to publish a plugin for public use:

• Host your own repository
  Developers can maintain a separate repository, host the plugin themselves, and provide users with command-line instructions to add the repository to their system. Once added, the plugin appears under System → Firmware → Plugins.
  
• Submit the plugin to the official repository
  Developers can contribute their plugin to the opnsense/plugins repository, allowing it to appear directly in the default OPNsense plugin list without requiring users to add external repositories.
  

Where Is the Problem?

If a developer wants their plugin to be easily discoverable by users, the most practical route is publishing it under the official opnsense/plugins GitHub repository. However, doing so requires compliance with the BSD-2-Clause license and effectively places the code under the project's governance and license. For some developers, this creates concerns about licensing flexibility and long-term control over their work.

On the other hand, publishing plugins in private repositories significantly reduces their visibility, meaning many users may never discover them unless they happen to find them independently and manually add the external repository to their system in order to install the plugin.

This creates a trade-off between visibility and accessibility versus licensing flexibility and control.

Possible Solution?

One possible approach would be to implement an official plugin registry or indexing system within OPNsense, enabling third-party developers to register plugin metadata (name, description, version, repository URL) and have these plugins displayed via the "Show Community Plugins" section of the GUI.

This approach would maintain developer ownership and licensing flexibility, improve the visibility of third-party plugins, and enhance the user experience. It would also strengthen OPNsense as a platform, since there are plugins that expand its capabilities currently exist outside the official repository and are not widely known. Furthermore, it could reduce maintenance overhead by enabling plugin-related issues and support to be managed by their respective maintainers instead of being centralized within the opnsense/plugins project.

I would be very interested to hear the thoughts of the OPNsense team and the community on this matter.