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Open Choice

Managing Plugins

The Plugins panel

The Plugins panel lists all installed plugins with their current status. For each plugin you can see:

  • Name, publisher, and version
  • Trust status (verified, warning, quarantined)
  • Enabled / disabled state

Click a plugin name to open its detail page.

Enabling and disabling

A disabled plugin is excluded from task execution but remains installed. Its files stay on disk and its database record is preserved.

Use the toggle on the plugin detail page or in the plugin list. Disabling is useful when you want to temporarily stop a plugin from running without uninstalling it.

Disabled plugins do not appear as available in the task runner. If a task file references a disabled plugin’s alias, execution will fail with “plugin not available”.

Uninstalling

Plugins → (plugin name) → Remove

This deletes the plugin binary from disk, removes all cached help and schema content from the database, and deletes the plugin registry entry. Snippets contributed by the plugin are also removed.

Uninstalling is not reversible — you will need to reinstall from the registry or a package file to use the plugin again.

Unquarantining

If a plugin has been quarantined (automatically or by revocation), you can manually release it from quarantine after investigating.

Plugins → (plugin name) → Unquarantine

Before unquarantining, review the runtime events log on the plugin detail page to understand why it was quarantined. Unquarantining restores the plugin to trust_status = verified or warning (depending on its original trust tier) and allows it to run again.

If a plugin was quarantined due to revocation, unquarantining does not remove it from the revocation list. It will be re-quarantined the next time Open Choice starts. The correct resolution is to wait for the publisher to release a new signed version.

Running a self-test

The plugin detail page has a Run self-test button. This invokes the plugin’s built-in health check, which verifies the plugin binary is functional and that any external dependencies (like a runtime on PATH) are available.

Self-test results show:

  • Each test case with pass/fail status
  • Detail text explaining any failures

This is the first thing to try when a plugin is not behaving as expected.

Verifying the installation

Plugins → (plugin name) → Verify re-checks the binary SHA-256 against the value recorded at install time. If the hash has changed — indicating the binary was modified after installation — the plugin is quarantined.

Run this if you suspect a plugin binary has been tampered with.

Viewing runtime events

The plugin detail page shows a log of all recorded runtime events for that plugin: installs, self-tests, errors, quarantine events, and unquarantines. This is useful for debugging and for understanding why a plugin was auto-quarantined.