Plugin Marketplace with Easy 1-Click Installation

Feature Ideas
1

To unlock the full potential of Baserow and enable significant growth, it’s essential to prioritize the plugin ecosystem. Particularly by making it as accessible and user-friendly as possible.

A Plugin Marketplace with seamless 1-click installation would dramatically lower the barrier for users and developers to extend Baserow. This isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s a strategic requirement for long-term success.

We’ve seen how this kind of ecosystem has propelled other platforms:

  • Apple’s App Store was key to the iPhone’s massive success. Not just the hardware, but the ability to easily extend functionality through apps.
  • WordPress has grown into one of the most used platforms on the web, thanks in large part to its plugin system and how easy it is to install and manage plugins from the start.

Likewise, Baserow could benefit from a similar approach. A polished, in-app plugin marketplace would:

  • Encourage community contributions
  • Enable rapid extension of features
  • Improve the overall developer experience
  • Help position Baserow as a platform, not just a product

This is also something @Bram has highlighted in multiple videos:

“What you see with a lot of open source projects is they are successful, not because it’s a great product, but because of the ecosystem around it. I think plugins are a very important part. […] We haven’t been focusing that much on the developer experience and how easy it is to install.”

“There are a lot of successful open source projects out there, and they’re very successful because they allow plugins, for example.”

I searched the #feature-ideas category and the GitLab issues, but couldn’t find an existing discussion or ticket for this.

I strongly believe this deserves more focus, as it could be a game-changer for the future of Baserow.

Thanks again for building such a great project and enabling plugin support. Now let’s take the next step and vote for this feature request! :wink:

Do you have any indication of when we might expect something like this to be implemented?

2

Hey @bongaards, thank you so much for your interest. I couldn’t agree more that plugins can play an important role for Baserow. The architecture of Baserow has been build in a modular way, so everything can already be extended.

However, there are different kinds of plugins. A plugin with an easy one-click installation typically lives on the frontend layers, and has big limitations in terms of what it can do. The “real” plugins can extend the backend and frontend, but are a bit more difficult to install, and require a full system restart in order to work, and come with a bunch of security risks as well.

We have plans of launching a plugin ecosystem, although it’s not prioritized at the moment. The reason for that is because the internal API of Baserow changes constantly because of actively development of core components in the tool. If we officially launch plugins, then we would need to introduce a documentation process, and can’t just change everything we want because it would make the existing plugins incompatible. We can of course take all that into account, but it would slow down development of the product significantly. It’s a tradeoff.

We’ve decided not to focus on plugins while core components of the product are still actively being developed. I hope that this changes in 2026.

1 Like
3

@bram
I agree until baserow core is stable his is not achievable, but if you see this other post Plugin Development Or Dev Environment very slow and causes lag here to even develop any plug-in is becoming a challenge as the developer mode version is constantly making the server to restart or it hangs and either times out or leads to memory and CPU max out. I’m sure new developers like us need to know how to exactly fix this as we are new to baserow environment and also we are aware this is primarily because it’s built on older version of nuxtjs but what we would appreciate is some help in any work around or how to exactly set up the installation for dev version as constant rebooting is quite frustrating and there is no way out or resource to help us fix so we can develop custom plugins
Any help is appreciated
Many thanks

4

Hey @ketanchandaria, the developer environment is indeed quite resource intensive. The biggest problem with running out of memory is related to using Nuxt 2 with quite a large codebase. Once we have updated to Nuxt 3 (Update Nuxt.js to version 3 (#760) · Issues · Baserow / baserow · GitLab), we expect that it will much better.

5

Thanks @bram and we are already aware of the cause of this issue. My question is … you already have developers that are currently developing custom plugins at this moment on the Nuxt v2 and I’m sure they would not be facing such a bad situation like us as, otherwise they would not be able to develop anything. For us, we could have missed out on some important steps or tweaks that we are unaware as for us the docker server keeps constantly shutting and restarting (almost ever couple of minutes). Can you please help us with the correct steps we need to take in order to configure? We are using Ubuntu 22.04 version OS (on a windows laptop partition and the RAM is 16 GB, i7). Just need some guidance on how best to install the dev version like you or other developers have done as to the version of baserow to use, OS at our end and the exact steps to follow. We cannot wait until Nuxt v3 as this could take months to be updated. Thanks

6

Hey @ketanchandaria, have you tried running the development environment using the instructions mentioned here Running the dev environment?

I’m running it that way, and it’s running good for me. The frontend occasionally restarts because of that out of memory bug in Nuxt 2, but it’s definitely workable. The only change I’ve made it setting this environment variable:

POSTGRES_DEV_EXTRA_ARGS="-c max_connections=500 -c shared_buffers=1024MB -c fsync=off -c full_page_writes=off -c synchronous_commit=off"

But that shoudn’t make any difference. What kind of resources have you configured that Docker can take?

When I start the environment, the resource usage looks a bit like this:

CONTAINER ID   NAME                               CPU %     MEM USAGE / LIMIT     MEM %     NET I/O           BLOCK I/O         PIDS
896b4df30448   baserow-celery-beat-worker-1       1.72%     252.5MiB / 31.29GiB   0.79%     17.8kB / 45.3kB   201kB / 0B        8
b0700c998205   baserow-celery-export-worker-1     40.61%    1.83GiB / 31.29GiB    5.85%     8.96MB / 6.46MB   25MB / 12.3kB     21
fde751ae0f32   baserow-celery-1                   40.73%    1.779GiB / 31.29GiB   5.68%     619kB / 746kB     21.7MB / 8.19kB   20
e8fc84b07684   baserow-web-frontend-1             29.99%    2.521GiB / 31.29GiB   8.06%     2.15kB / 356B     71MB / 31.1MB     26
aa4ee511964b   baserow-celery-flower-1            0.02%     267.7MiB / 31.29GiB   0.84%     472kB / 95.1kB    75.7MB / 0B       11
ca6773bb1aec   baserow-backend-1                  8.13%     522.8MiB / 31.29GiB   1.63%     923kB / 286kB     35.4MB / 205kB    15
4c92559d0288   baserow-mailhog-1                  0.00%     18.47MiB / 31.29GiB   0.06%     1.82kB / 0B       8.63MB / 0B       8
20521e6fee6e   baserow-mjml-email-compiler-1      0.01%     137MiB / 31.29GiB     0.43%     9.8kB / 2.75kB    51.6MB / 2.41MB   24
38042049972a   baserow-web-frontend-storybook-1   0.01%     258.4MiB / 31.29GiB   0.81%     1.82kB / 0B       35.8MB / 156kB    31
db63c1d1da5b   baserow-db-1                       0.02%     414.2MiB / 31.29GiB   1.29%     3.4MB / 4.37MB    430MB / 43.6MB    8
24dee50eb9ac   baserow-redis-1                    0.21%     26.14MiB / 31.29GiB   0.08%     4.24MB / 6.61MB   13.3MB / 0B       5
78c5073e6cba   baserow-otel-collector-1           0.09%     82.17MiB / 31.29GiB   0.26%     1.82kB / 0B       67.1MB / 0B       15
dde6d92d454d   baserow-caddy-1                    0.00%     46.92MiB / 31.29GiB   0.15%     1.82kB / 0B       35.5MB / 12.3kB   11

It uses quite some resources, but you should be able to make it work on the machine that you described.