Make missing plugin repo errors more informative by dmytrovoytko · Pull Request #4087 · micro-editor/micro

dmytrovoytko · 2026-05-06T09:57:15Z

Thank you for this great editor!
Please consider this update to handle missing plugin repo errors better.
It addresses #1276

Plugins in official channel are ok now (may change someday), but 3 plugins of unofficial channel are missing and it shows up as strange messages while running micro -plugin available or other plugin commands:

Failed to decode repository data:
 json: cannot unmarshal number into Go value of type config.PluginPackages
Failed to decode repository data:
 invalid character '<' looking for beginning of value
Failed to decode repository data:
 invalid character '<' looking for beginning of value

Instead it would show up like this:

Skipped: Plugin repository not found at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cadnza/mxc/main/repo.json (Status Code: 404).
Skipped: Plugin repository not found at https://notabug.org/dustdfg/micro-calc/raw/master/repo.json (Status Code: 404).
Skipped: Plugin repository not found at https://notabug.org/dustdfg/micro-mdtree/raw/master/repo.json (Status Code: 404).

JoeKar · 2026-05-06T17:11:24Z

I think these fmt.Fprintf() logs might become quite long.
What about:

fmt.Fprintf(out, "Skipped: %s\n", pr)
fmt.Fprintf(out, "Reason: XYZ (Status Code: %d)\n", statusCode)

?

@Neko-Box-Coder:

3 plugins of unofficial channel are missing

Something to consider for your?

Neko-Box-Coder · 2026-05-06T18:42:53Z

This is quite similar to one of my (forgotten) PRs.

@Neko-Box-Coder:

3 plugins of unofficial channel are missing

Something to consider for your?

The upstream for all those 3 are all gone/archived :(

It's an annoying error but any plugin actions are not affected (Apart from interacting from these 3 plugins ofc).
I will need to update the json for these plugins to point to my stable branch. I am slightly busy now but will try to sort it out asap.

JoeKar · 2026-05-06T18:48:41Z

This is quite similar to one of my (forgotten) PRs.

Oh, damn.
Well, both have their own advantages. 🤔

Neko-Box-Coder · 2026-05-06T18:53:39Z

To be fair, my PR was also doing something else.

We can merge this and I can adjust my PR.

My PR was also trying to do a reasonable timeout such that a git repo with very slow/unstable connection (notabug was one of them I believe, potentially codeburg as well) won't block the rest of the plugins.

dmytrovoytko · 2026-05-06T19:21:23Z

I think these fmt.Fprintf() logs might become quite long. What about:
fmt.Fprintf(out, "Skipped: %s\n", pr)
fmt.Fprintf(out, "Reason: XYZ (Status Code: %d)\n", statusCode)
?

Now it would look like this (better, thanks!)

Skipped: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cadnza/mxc/main/repo.json
 Reason: Plugin repository not found (Status Code: 404)
Skipped: https://notabug.org/dustdfg/micro-calc/raw/master/repo.json
 Reason: Plugin repository not found (Status Code: 404)
Skipped: https://notabug.org/dustdfg/micro-mdtree/raw/master/repo.json
 Reason: Plugin repository not found (Status Code: 404)

JoeKar · 2026-05-07T16:46:59Z

Now it would look like this (better, thanks!)

Yes, better. The same applies to:

fmt.Fprintln(out, "Failed to decode repository data [", pr, "]:\n", err)

Which is quite long too with the causing plugin URL.

dmytrovoytko · 2026-05-07T18:29:01Z

Fixed.
It would look like this now (in case 404 wasn't caught)

Skipped: https://notabug.org/dustdfg/micro-calc/raw/master/repo.json
 Reason: Failed to decode repository data
  invalid character '<' looking for beginning of value

dmytrovoytko · 2026-05-10T10:39:41Z

@JoeKar that's done, thank you. Anything else?

JoeKar · 2026-05-10T18:57:26Z

@JoeKar that's done, thank you. Anything else?

Just the fact that we have now 5 commits in the PR history, but we can squash them on merge.

dmytrovoytko · 2026-05-16T08:37:09Z

@Neko-Box-Coder is there anything from your side on this?

Neko-Box-Coder · 2026-05-25T19:22:55Z

@Neko-Box-Coder is there anything from your side on this?

Sorry for the late reply, missed this somehow. Nope, seems good to me. Appreciate your work.

dmytrovoytko · 2026-05-29T15:10:33Z

@JoeKar is there any obstacle to merge this update?

dmaluka · 2026-05-29T21:05:43Z

+	if statusCode != http.StatusOK {
+		fmt.Fprintf(out, "Skipped: Unexpected status code %d from plugin repository at %s.\n", statusCode, pr)
+		return PluginPackages{}
+	}


Can we just leverage https://pkg.go.dev/net/http#StatusText instead?

In Go I'm a beginner, so I did the fix of incorrect error handling "plain and obvious".

@dmaluka and @JoeKar you better know what is better form for messaging here.

I just mean that http.StatusText() already provides descriptive strings for all those dozens of status codes (not just these two 403 and 404), so we can just use it, e.g.:

diff --git a/internal/config/plugin_installer.go b/internal/config/plugin_installer.go index d6f7e2c9..799cf3aa 100644 --- a/internal/config/plugin_installer.go +++ b/internal/config/plugin_installer.go @@ -155,23 +155,12 @@ func (pr PluginRepository) Fetch(out io.Writer) PluginPackages { return PluginPackages{} } defer resp.Body.Close() - - // Handle cases when plugin repo is not available - statusCode := resp.StatusCode - if statusCode == http.StatusForbidden { - fmt.Fprintf(out, "Skipped: %s\n", pr) - fmt.Fprintf(out, " Reason: Access to plugin repository is forbidden (Status Code: %d)\n", statusCode) - return PluginPackages{} - } - if statusCode == http.StatusNotFound { - fmt.Fprintf(out, "Skipped: %s\n", pr) - fmt.Fprintf(out, " Reason: Plugin repository not found (Status Code: %d)\n", statusCode) - return PluginPackages{} - } - if statusCode != http.StatusOK { + + if resp.StatusCode != http.StatusOK { fmt.Fprintf(out, "Skipped: %s\n", pr) - fmt.Fprintf(out, " Reason: Unexpected status (Status Code: %d)\n", statusCode) - return PluginPackages{} + fmt.Fprintf(out, " Reason: Server error %d (%s)\n", resp.StatusCode, + http.StatusText(resp.StatusCode)) + return nil } decoder := json5.NewDecoder(resp.Body) @@ -181,7 +170,7 @@ func (pr PluginRepository) Fetch(out io.Writer) PluginPackages { fmt.Fprintf(out, "Skipped: %s\n", pr) fmt.Fprintf(out, " Reason: Failed to decode repository data:\n") fmt.Fprintf(out, " %s\n", err) - return PluginPackages{} + return nil } if len(plugins) > 0 { return PluginPackages{plugins[0]}

dmaluka · 2026-05-30T10:17:56Z

 		return PluginPackages{}
 	}
 	defer resp.Body.Close()
+


Unneeded space (in particular, gofmt complains about it).

dmaluka · 2026-05-30T10:23:17Z

+	statusCode := resp.StatusCode
+	if statusCode == http.StatusForbidden {
+		fmt.Fprintf(out, "Skipped: Access to plugin repository at %s is forbidden (Status Code: %d).\n", pr, statusCode)
+		return PluginPackages{}


We return just nil at the end of the function (and also in GetAllPluginPackages()), so we can return nil here as well, for consistency? (Functionality-wise it would be the same.)

Thank you for explanations!

With your short and simple version we'll get such output:

Skipped: Unexpected status code 404 from plugin repository at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cadnza/mxc/main/repo.json. Skipped: Unexpected status code 404 from plugin repository at https://notabug.org/dustdfg/micro-mdtree/raw/master/repo.json. Skipped: Unexpected status code 404 from plugin repository at https://notabug.org/dustdfg/micro-calc/raw/master/repo.json.

Not every user understands what 404 mean... that's why I handle it separately - to explain "in human terms". From the other side, even knowing user can't do much, just accept. Plugin developers understand what '404' means and what to do about it. I'm ok with such form.
@JoeKar might comment "logs might become quite long" again :)

as my first try looked this way

Skipped: Plugin repository not found at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cadnza/mxc/main/repo.json (Status Code: 404). Skipped: Plugin repository not found at https://notabug.org/dustdfg/micro-calc/raw/master/repo.json (Status Code: 404). Skipped: Plugin repository not found at https://notabug.org/dustdfg/micro-mdtree/raw/master/repo.json (Status Code: 404).

So please you together decide on a perfect form.

With your short and simple version we'll get such output: [...]

I'm not sure what you are referring to. With my version, the output is:

Skipped: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cadnza/mxc/main/repo.json Reason: Server error 404 (Not Found) Skipped: https://notabug.org/dustdfg/micro-calc/raw/master/repo.json Reason: Server error 404 (Not Found) Skipped: https://notabug.org/dustdfg/micro-mdtree/raw/master/repo.json Reason: Server error 404 (Not Found)

oh, my mistake, sorry!

@dmaluka can you please take a look now?

Could you squash the commits into one? There is no point in polluting the commit history with all these intermediate changes with identical names.

(We could squash it ourselves on merge, but then the commit message would look quite bizarre.)

Done, looks much better now!
Thank you very much to both of you for your patience, I learned new things!

Neko-Box-Coder mentioned this pull request May 6, 2026

Upstreams for 3 plugins are gone in main branch Neko-Box-Coder/unofficial-plugin-channel#22

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JoeKar reviewed May 8, 2026

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Comment thread internal/config/plugin_installer.go Outdated

JoeKar approved these changes May 10, 2026

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dmaluka reviewed May 29, 2026

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dmaluka reviewed May 30, 2026

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Make missing plugin repo errors more informative

1c6b849

dmytrovoytko force-pushed the dmytrovoytko-patch-1 branch from 9604b42 to 1c6b849 Compare May 30, 2026 21:38

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