Angular support deprecation

Angular plugin support is deprecated, and it will be removed in a future release. There are still many community plugins that depend on Grafana’s angular plugin support for them to work. The same is true for many internal (private) plugins developed over the years by Grafana users. Grafana version 9 will have a server configuration option, global for the whole instance, that will control if angular plugin support is available or not. By default angular support is still enabled but this will soon change as we complete the migration of all angular code in the core product.

Why are we deprecating angular support?

AngularJS is an old frontend framework that stopped active development many years ago. As a result, it is a security risk. AngularJS also requires unsafe-eval in the CSP (Content Security Policy) settings which also reduces the security level of how javascript is executed in the browser.

When will angular plugins stop working?

We hope to migrate the last remaining angular code in core Grafana later this year. Then the setting enable_angular_support can be disable by default. This will make all angular plugins stop working. If you still depend on community or internally developed plugins that require AngularJS then you will have to enable this option.

This is a good time to start working on migrating plugins to React.

Our plan is to fully remove angular plugin support in version 10 released in 2023. Meaning all plugins that do depend on angular will stop working and this temporary option to enable it introduced in v9 will be removed.

How do I migrate an angular plugin to React?

Depending on if it’s a data source plugin, panel plugin, or app plugin the process will differ.

For panels, the rendering logic could in some cases be easily preserved but all options need to be redone to use the declarative options framework. For data source plugins the query editor and config options will likely need a total rewrite.