Plugin Installation about grafana-operator

[ToonTijtgat2]

Dear

I think there is a good usecase to make it possible to install grafana plugins via the operator.
Grafana oncall needs a plugin that has nothing to do with a datasource or dashboard.

If there would be a possiblilty to install a plugin via the operator would be a good thing.

Thanks for checking

[pb82]

The openshift/origin-grafana image does not seem to support plugin installation in the way that the official image does. I'd like to keep the operator functional even when using third party images (that is often a requirement for productization or use in internal environments) . That's why its currently implemented using the init container. It works in the following way:

1. Plugins can be added to dashboards, see for example here
2. When the operator reconciles the dashboards it builds a list of all plugins that need to be installed (it will also do some sanity checking on the versions)
3. It passes this list as an env var to the init container when then uses a small Python script to download the plugins and copy them into a volume mounted at the expected Grafana plugins location
4. Grafana is restarted to load the new Plugins

I've thought about allowing Plugins to be added to the Grafana CR too (instead of only to dashboard CRs) but had no use case yet that would require it.

[gambol99]

Hi @pb82 ... makes sense to me :-) .. perhaps one solution to enabled both would be to allow users to add additional envs mapped to the deployment ...

[pb82]

@gambol99 Additional additional env vars via the CR sounds interesting. Do you see any other use cases (besides plugins) that this would allow?

[pb82]

@gambol99 Closing this issue as its more of a feature request. Feel free to reopen if you have a use case for allowing to set the env vars in the CR.