Add flag to disable plugins watch

[adriangonz]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe the impact that the lack of the feature requested is creating.

We don't run in Headlamp in cluster, but we do build a Headlamp image with a few pre-configured Kubeconfigs which we then host and expose to give access to several clusters. The plugins are baked into the Headlamp image and are not expected to change at run-time.

However, if we add anything to the /plugins folder (instead of the /static-plugins folder), Headlamp's frontend will constantly keep refreshing (every ~5 secs). Headlamp's backend keeps showing the following message:

{"level":"info","source":"/headlamp/backend/pkg/plugins/plugins.go","line":312,"time":"2025-02-12T11:51:30Z","message":"Sending reload plugins signal to frontend"}

There seems to be a "watch" running over the files in the /plugins folder which gets disabled when Headlamp is running in-cluster:

https://github.com/headlamp-k8s/headlamp/blob/979d187d389f1c936135bb05708d48ff1ae19081/backend/cmd/headlamp.go#L356-L363

It seems like the same would be useful on other contexts when Headlamp is not necessarily running in-cluster. Would it be possible to add a new flag to control whether the plugins watch is disabled?

Describe the solution you'd like

A new env var or CLI flag to disable the plugins watch.

What users will benefit from this feature?

Users neither running Headlamp in-cluster, nor locally within a Desktop app.

Are you able to implement this feature?

If we agree on an approach, we could help out.

Additional context

N/A

[joaquimrocha]

Thanks @adriangonz . Your suggestion makes sense.
I think we should use a flag in the backend for this. Maybe --watch-plugins-folder?

[skoeva]

I can look into this since I worked on the plugins CLI flags a little while ago