Varaverk/Plugin/README-Plugin.md

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🔌 PLUGIN

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The Varaverk Unraid plugin — a web UI that wraps the entire script ecosystem. Scheduler, Monitor, Docker management, Partnership sync, Fallback state, and Arrs — all surfaced inside the Unraid web interface as a first-class plugin.

Why this folder exists: The scripts need a control surface. Managing a 50+ container homelab ecosystem from terminal windows is friction. The plugin turns configuration files into editable forms, cron schedules into a visual scheduler, and runtime log output into a live dashboard — without duplicating any of the logic that already lives in common.sh and the conf files.

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━━━ THE PROBLEM THAT BUILT THIS ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The script ecosystem works well from the command line, but day-to-day operation is not the command line. Checking whether the nightly sync ran, adjusting a container's watchdog limit, confirming the partnership fallback is active — all of that requires SSH sessions, knowing which log files to look at, and remembering which conf variable controls what.

The plugin solves the visibility problem: one URL on any browser, on any device on the Tailscale network, shows everything running and lets you act on it. No extra tooling, no separate monitoring stack, no third-party dashboards.

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━━━ WHAT THIS FOLDER CONTAINS ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Plugin/
├── dev_install.sh             # One-time developer setup: symlinks plugin into web server
├── Icons/                     # Source icon assets (1024px master files)
└── unraid/                    # The Unraid plugin application
    ├── Varaverk.page          # Main plugin entry point (Tasks menu)
    ├── VaraverkSettings.page  # Unraid Settings → Other Settings entry
    ├── api/                   # PHP API endpoints (called by JS via fetch)
    ├── css/                   # Plugin stylesheet
    ├── event/                 # Unraid event hooks (boot-time cron setup, array lifecycle)
    ├── icons/                 # Plugin icons served by emhttp
    ├── images/                # Plugin images
    ├── include/               # PHP business logic shared across pages
    ├── js/                    # Frontend JavaScript
    ├── pages/                 # Per-tab page includes (monitor, scheduler, docker, ...)
    └── run_job.sh             # Script runner invoked by the Scheduler

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━━━ RELATIONSHIP TO THE REST OF THE REPO ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Plugin is a wrapper, never a reimplementation. Every setting the plugin reads or writes lives in Configurations/master.conf or Configurations/host*.conf — the same files the shell scripts read. The plugin has no separate data store. If a conf file changes outside the plugin (by hand, by SSH), the plugin reflects it on next load.

The one exception is varaverk.cfg on flash (/boot/config/plugins/varaverk/varaverk.cfg), which holds a single bootstrap value: SCRIPTS_DIR. This is the path the plugin uses to find the Configurations directory and all scripts. Everything else flows from there.

The plugin also taps common.sh indirectly — include/config.php mirrors resolve_tailscale_ip() and detect_host() exactly, using the same logic as common.sh so behaviour stays consistent without a shell dependency.

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━━━ SCRIPTS IN THIS FOLDER ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Script	Role	When It Runs
dev_install.sh	Symlinks Plugin/unraid/ into Unraid's web server	Once, manually, after cloning or moving the repo

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━━━ UNRAID INTEGRATION POINTS ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

File	Where it appears in Unraid
Varaverk.page	Tasks menu item
VaraverkSettings.page	Settings → Other Settings tile
event/disks_mounted/rebuild_cron	Fires on every boot — copies .plg, rebuilds cron
event/disks_mounted/array_start_jobs	Fires when array starts
event/disks_unmounting/array_stop_jobs	Fires when array stops
/boot/config/plugins/varaverk.plg	Registers the plugin with Unraid's plugin system (lives on flash, not in repo)