Extending Plasma Krunner to search for GitLab projects

This blog post was published more than one year ago and might be outdated!

January 10, 2019 · 2 min read

Head of IT Business Operations

Last year I realized that Krunner, the launcher built into the KDE Plasma desktop is extendable by implementing a D-Bus service. I remembered that Derick Rethans once built a dbus extension for PHP5. Unfortunately there does not exist a "final" port of the extension to PHP7, but several people tried to fix most of the problems. I gave both the PHP7 & PHP5 version a try but got segfaults when sending data over D-Bus.

During my christmas holidays, I picked up on the project again and looked for alternatives. Why not give Go a try and try to implement the project in Go? Even without prior experience in Go, I had a prototype up and running quickly. My main goal was to add search capabilities for our company's GitLab instance. I wanted to search for project names and get a list of links back that I could open in a browser. The result can be seen in my personal GitHub project.

The implementation itself is rather simple. All you need is an object (service) that exposes 3 methods: Actions(), Match() and Run(). The Actions() method can be ignored for our use-case. The Match() method gets called whenever the user enters data in KRunner, the Run() method is called when an item got selected in KRunner(), in this case we launch a browser with the url of the selected project.

To make KRunner aware of a new endpoint to query, you simply need to create a file called krunner-gitlab.desktop in $HOME/.local/share/kservices5. This will instruct KRunner to call the de.hochdoerfer.gitlab service. If the service is running and the required methods are exposed, KRunner will call them and get the data back.

[Desktop Entry]
Name=GitLab
Comment=GitLab KRunner
X-KDE-ServiceTypes=Plasma/Runner
Type=Service
Icon=internet-web-browser
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Author=Stephan Hochdörfer
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Email=S.Hochdoerfer@bitExpert.de
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Name=krunner-gitlab
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Version=1.0
X-KDE-PluginInfo-License=Apache-2.0
X-KDE-PluginInfo-EnabledByDefault=true
X-Plasma-API=DBus
X-Plasma-DBusRunner-Service=de.hochdoerfer.gitlab
X-Plasma-DBusRunner-Path=/krunner

Feel free to give it a try and let me know what you think.