Plugins & Marketplace

Much of MappView’s functionality ships as plugins. The Plugins menu activates built-in plugins, and the Manage Plugins dialog (under Settings) installs, updates, and removes external plugins from a curated registry.

The Plugins menu

The Plugins menu lists every available plugin under Activate plugin. Click a plugin to toggle it on or off; a check mark shows which are active. Built-in plugins include the Layer Control, Basemaps, Components (Measure, Bookmark, Legend, Colorbar, Minimap, View State, Search, Print, HTML), GeoEditor, Time Slider, Layer Swipe, Street View, USGS LiDAR, Overture Maps, GeoAgent, Historical Imagery, and the federal Web Services group. See Data Integrations.

For plugins that add an on-map control, a submenu lets you position the control in any corner: top left, top right, bottom left, or bottom right.

Manage Plugins

Open Settings → Manage Plugins to browse the marketplace. The dialog is modeled on QGIS, with sections for All, Installed, Not installed, Upgradeable, and Settings.

• Search the registry and Install an entry with one click. Installation records the plugin’s manifest URL and registers it immediately, with no restart.
• Update appears when a newer version is published; it re-fetches and re-registers the plugin in place, keeping the old version if the update fails.
• Uninstall (after a confirmation) unregisters the plugin at runtime and tears down any active control.
• The Settings section manages additional plugin sources: extra local directories and manual manifest URLs.

Compatibility is checked against each entry’s minMappViewVersion, so incompatible plugins are flagged rather than installed.

!!! note “Trust model” The marketplace registry is curated, manifests require HTTPS (or HTTP on localhost, 127.0.0.1, or [::1] for development), and marketplace or project-supplied installs require explicit consent because plugins run as trusted code. A deployment operator can separately approve exact manifest URLs through the trusted registry; those URLs load without a prompt, so control of that registry is equivalent to control of deployed application code.

Where plugins come from

• Curated registry: the marketplace fetches the JSON registry configured by VITE_MAPPVIEW_PLUGIN_REGISTRY_URL. The default is the deployment’s plugin origin (registry.json in production; a copy is also baked into every build).
• Deployment-trusted registry: the app automatically registers the exact manifest URLs published by VITE_MAPPVIEW_TRUSTED_PLUGIN_REGISTRY_URL. These deployment-approved plugins do not show a project trust prompt, but saved project state still controls activation.
• Manifest URL: point the Settings section at any plugin.json manifest URL.
• Local directory: load a plugin from a local folder (desktop app).
• Bundled drop-ins: plugins placed in public/plugins/<id>/ load automatically in a build.

Writing your own plugin

To build a plugin, see Reference → Plugin API for the TypeScript interfaces, the plugin.json manifest contract, and the list of built-in plugins.