Add plugins to docker images?

[nniehoff]

Today with the Nautobot docker image in order to add plugins you need to build a custom docker container. I am curious what people think of adding the ability to add plugins dynamically to the container, perhaps with an env var something like:

NAUTOBOT_PLUGINS="nautobot-chatops==1.5.0,nautobot-capacity-metrics==1.1.0"

My hesitation with adding this feature really comes down to security. Today installing plugins requires a pip install of a python package. Enabling an install during runtime especially in a production environment doesn't sit well with me. On the other hand, it would be incredibly useful to have an easy way to install plugins without a custom image.

Should we enable this for production or maybe just dev environments and we require another variable NAUTOBOT_DISCLAIMER="yes I know what I am doing but do it anyway" type thing to enable this feature. Again concerned a bit about security here if someone were able to set this variable in a prod environment we would basically be enabling installing any package from pypi.

[jvanderaa]

The bigger thing that I believe we need to figure out if doing so is how to modify the PLUGINS_CONFIG setting. This is a dictionary and there are plugins that will need to have the settings updated. Such as ChatOps specifically, and others as well.

[nniehoff]

I know we want to work more towards 12factor, perhaps now that the django-environ project is getting some love we could revisit that which would provide 1 way to provide a PLUGINS_CONFIG value. Today you can override the entire nautobot_config.py which isn't ideal but it is doable.