Theia loading plugin dependencies from user AppData

#1

I built a new Theia app from scratch and launched it for the first time which means that there should not be any plugins/extensions to load (I did not specify any theiaPlugins in package.json).

Why does Theia looks to load plugins/extensions from the user AppData folder? And there are some extensions there too, which I had installed in the instance of some other Theia application. Why all of these are merged in a single place under AppData?
Now each new app I run, it tries to load plugins/extensions from AppData and fails with error messages like:

root ERROR Failed to load plugin dependencies from 'AppData\Local\Temp\vscode-unpacked\hello-world-0.0.1.vsix' path Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open 'AppData\Local\Temp\vscode-unpacked\hello-world-0.0.1.vsix\package.json'

root ERROR Failed to load plugin dependencies from 'AppData\Local\Temp\vscode-unpacked\llvm-vs-code-extensions.vscode-clangd-0.1.24.vsix' path Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open 'AppData\Local\Temp\vscode-unpacked\llvm-vs-code-extensions.vscode-clangd-0.1.24.vsix\package.json

These hello-world and clangd extensions were installed in some other Theia application and now each new Theia app is trying to load these extensions. This behavior seems misleading. Is there any configuration for it?

#2

@umar-shabbir While theiaPlugins is used for built-in plugins, users always have the option to download and install more plugins by themselves. These are by default, always stored in the %tmp%/vscode-unpacked directory. You can override this behavior by overriding the PluginVsCodeFileHandler#getExtensionDir method.

#3

Ok, these extension are stored from my previous extension installs on my machine, so they exists in the tmp directory. But I am still confused on what does these error messages indicate here? What is the expected behavior and why the errors are appearing which suggests that something is not working as it should and it produced these errors?

#4

@umar-shabbir The errors are probably related to this issue: https://github.com/eclipse-theia/theia/issues/12757