Plugins
Plugin Overview
Understand the shared lifecycle and backend split for plugins in vs.
vs supports two backend families:
- Lua plugins for small, scriptable hook-based integrations
- Native plugins for typed descriptor-based integrations backed by
vs-plugin-wasi
Shared capabilities
Both plugin tracks expose the same conceptual lifecycle to the rest of the workspace:
- list available versions
- describe how to install a selected version
- emit environment keys for an installed runtime
- expose manifest metadata
- optionally parse legacy version file contents
Backend gating
Backend support is compile-time gated. A build only accepts plugin backends that were compiled into the current binary.
Common configurations are:
--features lua--features wasi--features full
If you add a plugin whose backend is not available in the current build, vs returns an explicit unsupported-backend error.
Sources
Plugins can come from:
- the configured registry source
- an explicit local directory
- a remote source materialized into the local plugin store