Lifecycle and Management

Superset will manage the full lifecycle of extensions, including activation, deactivation, and cleanup. The lifecycle is designed to ensure that extensions can safely register resources and reliably clean them up when no longer needed.

Frontend lifecycle

• When an extension is activated, its activate(context) function is called. The extension should register all event listeners, commands, views, and other contributions using the provided context, and add any disposables to context.disposables.
• When the extension is deactivated (e.g., disabled or uninstalled), Superset automatically calls dispose() on all items in context.disposables, ensuring that event listeners, commands, and UI contributions are removed and memory leaks are avoided.

Backend lifecycle

• Backend entry points, which can add REST API endpoints or execute arbitrary backend code, are eagerly evaluated during startup. Other backend code is lazily loaded when needed, ensuring minimal startup latency.
• In the future, we plan to leverage mechanisms like Redis pub/sub (already an optional dependency of Superset) to dynamically manage the lifecycle of extensions' backend functionality. This will ensure that all running instances of the Superset backend have the same available extensions without requiring a restart. This will be addressed in a follow-up SIP.

The proof-of-concept (POC) code for this SIP already implements a management module where administrators can upload, delete, enable/disable, and inspect the manifest for installed extensions via the Superset UI, making extension operations straightforward. These operations are currently supported dynamically for frontend extensions. For backend extensions, dynamic upload, deletion, and enable/disable are planned for a future iteration; at present, changes to backend extensions (such as uploading, deleting, or enabling/disabling) still require a server restart.

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