How Junk Store finds your extension

Discovery is by directory and by naming convention. There is no registry file and no install step, which is why an extension can be added simply by putting it in place.

An extension is found when it satisfies four things:

1. It lives in the right place, a directory under ~/.local/share/junkstore/scripts/Extensions/. The directory name is the store name.
2. It contains a store.sh. The dispatcher sources store.sh from each extension directory. No store.sh means the extension does not exist as far as Junk Store is concerned.
3. Its store.sh registers the store name. Generated scripts do this near the top with PLATFORMS+=("MyStore"), which is how the store announces itself.
4. It contains a static.json. This is what puts the extension on screen: its tab, where it is grouped, and the entries the interface offers for it.

Once registered, an action is dispatched by building a function name from the store and the action, <Store>_<action>, and calling it if such a function exists.

Two mechanisms, not one

The last requirement is worth separating from the others, because it works differently and fails differently.

store.sh makes an extension callable. static.json makes it visible. Nothing joins them up: a separate pass walks the whole Extensions tree, reads every static.json it finds, and merges them into one document that describes the interface. Your extension’s entry is one fragment of that merged result.

So the two failure modes look nothing alike:

Missing	Symptom
store.sh	Nothing runs. The extension is not there at all
static.json	Actions work if something calls them, but no tab appears

Both files are written for you by generation, so this mostly matters when you are looking at an extension that half works, or assembling one by hand.

Two practical consequences:

• Copying a directory in is enough to be discovered, provided its store.sh registers the correct name. If you copy an extension and forget to change the name inside store.sh, two directories will claim the same store name.
• A directory with no store.sh is silently ignored. There is no error, it just does not appear. If your extension is not showing up, check that file exists first.
• A stray directory is still scanned. Discovery has no notion of what is or is not meant to be an extension, so a backup copy of one, or a directory left behind by an experiment, is treated like any other. This is visible in practice: an Amazon.bak directory shows up in diagnostics as though it were a real extension.

All of this describes what is on disk. The files themselves come from the Generator, which holds the definition and writes store.sh, static.json and the rest when you regenerate. Discovery finds the scripts; the definition is where they come from. See The Generator.