Extension Hub¶

The Extension Hub is the central catalog for discovering and installing OpenEverest extensions — both Providers and Generic Plugins. It gives the community a single, curated place to publish extensions and gives operators a single place to find and install them.

The Hub has two parts:

The catalog — the openeverest/hub repository, a community-maintained registry of every published extension.
The Plugin Hub — an in-product plugin that surfaces the catalog inside the OpenEverest UI and shows which extensions are already installed on your cluster.

The catalog¶

The catalog lives in the openeverest/hub repository. It follows a formula / pointer model: each entry is a small formula.yaml file that points at an OCI artifact (a Helm chart) hosted in the author’s own registry. The catalog stores metadata and a pointer — not the extension code itself.

Extensions are organized into two groups:

Providers — database, storage and AI operators that OpenEverest manages.
Generic Plugins — UI, CLI, and backend extensions of OpenEverest itself.

How the index is generated¶

Authors contribute an extension by opening a pull request against the repository (see Publishing an extension). Because the formula is a pointer rather than code, review focuses on metadata accuracy and naming, not on a code audit.

When a pull request is merged into main, a GitHub Actions workflow regenerates an aggregated JSON manifest, index/index.json, and commits it back to the repository. This manifest contains the consolidated metadata for every plugin and provider in the catalog and is the single source of truth consumed by the Plugin Hub.

The index is published directly from main and served over the GitHub raw CDN:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openeverest/hub/main/index/index.json

graph LR
  A[Author opens PR<br/>formula.yaml] --> B[Maintainer review<br/>metadata only]
  B --> C[Merge to main]
  C --> D[GitHub Actions<br/>build-index workflow]
  D --> E[index.json<br/>committed to repo]
  E --> F[Served via raw CDN]
  F --> G[Plugin Hub UI]

The Plugin Hub¶

The Plugin Hub is a Generic Plugin that renders the catalog inside the OpenEverest web UI. It is installed as a dependency of OpenEverest v2, so it is available out of the box.

At runtime, the Plugin Hub fetches the generated index.json from the catalog and joins it with the list of extensions currently installed on your cluster. The result is a searchable, filterable table of every published extension, annotated with its install status, default-channel version, and categories.

Disabling the Plugin Hub¶

The Plugin Hub is enabled by default. If you do not want it, disable it at deploy time by setting the following Helm value when installing or upgrading the OpenEverest chart:

plugins:
  hub:
    enabled: false

Browsing and installing extensions¶

Each entry in the Plugin Hub opens a detail view with the extension’s description, source repository, maturity, categories, and — for open extensions — installation instructions.

Installation is currently performed outside the UI using Helm with OCI artifacts. For each extension, the detail view shows a copy-pasteable helm install command that installs the latest version committed to the catalog. The command follows this shape:

helm install <release-name> \
  <oci-chart-ref> \
  --version <version> \
  --namespace everest-system

For example, installing the Plugin Hub itself manually:

helm install plugin-hub \
  oci://ghcr.io/openeverest/charts/plugin-hub \
  --version 0.1.13 \
  --namespace everest-system

Providers and plugins install into the everest-system namespace. After installation, the extension appears as installed in the Plugin Hub, and Providers become available when creating a database.

Gated and vendor extensions¶

Not every extension is open source. Vendors can publish gated extensions — commercial or otherwise access-restricted — so that users can still discover them through the Hub.

Gated extensions are listed for discovery only. They typically do not include a public chart reference or an install command. Instead, the detail view shows the vendor, a short access note, and a link to the vendor’s page where you can request a license, credentials, or more information.

For example, a commercial provider might expose only a contact link and licensing instructions rather than a helm install command. To use it, follow the vendor’s process to obtain access and private registry credentials.

Publishing an extension¶

To add your own Provider or Generic Plugin to the catalog:

Publish your extension as a Helm chart to an OCI-compatible registry (GHCR, Docker Hub, Quay, and so on).
Fork openeverest/hub and copy the extensions/_template directory into extensions/providers/<slug> or extensions/plugins/<slug>.
Fill in formula.yaml, add a README.md and a logo, and open a pull request against main.
Automated validation checks the schema, naming, and required files. A maintainer reviews the metadata, and on merge the index is regenerated automatically.

For the full field reference and step-by-step instructions, see the publishing guide in the catalog repository.