feat(nextly): warn at boot when a plugin ships without a description

[mobeenabdullah]

T-21. A plugin with no admin.description is one the admin can only ever show by its package specifier — @nextlyhq/plugin-page-builder where another plugin shows "Build pages visually from blocks". The reader is left inferring the purpose from a name chosen for npm rather than for them.

Two corrections to the task note first

The tracker said this check "belongs beside the other plugin doctor diagnostics in packages/nextly". There is no doctor. nextly plugins has list and info and nothing else, and no diagnostics command exists anywhere in the repo. So the check needed a home rather than a neighbour.

It also said the plan "fills in the two first-party plugins that ship without a description". All three already have one — page-builder, form-builder and seo. So this PR fixes no plugin; its entire value is stopping the omission recurring, which is exactly what the note said was missing.

Where the check lives, and why not the alternatives

A boot warning, emitted beside the line that already names the registered plugins — because that line is the symptom: it is where a nameless plugin first shows up as a bare package specifier.

• Not an error. The omission is the plugin author's, it breaks nothing at runtime, and an operator cannot fix a third-party package from their own config. Failing their boot over someone else's missing string is punishment, not a control.
• Not type-level required. That is the real "cannot ship without one" boundary, and it is a breaking change for every existing third-party plugin. Worth doing deliberately rather than as a side effect of this task — flagging it rather than taking it.
• Not a CLI-only report. nextly plugins list is opt-in; the omission should surface to the person who will see its consequence, which is whoever boots the app.

Shape

pluginsMissingDescription(plugins) is pure and returns names, so the same question asked from a boot warning, a future CLI report or a test cannot become three answers. warnUndescribedPlugins(plugins, logger) takes the logger rather than reaching for one.

That second function exists for a specific reason. Wiring that lives only as a call site inside a several-hundred-line registration function can be deleted without any test noticing — I hit exactly that on #747, where removing a guard's call left every test on the guard itself green. Passing the logger puts the message under test.

Tests

Nine cases. The ones that matter:

• empty string and whitespace count as missing — a present-but-useless value satisfies both !== undefined and an optional chain, so a test covering only "absent" passes on an implementation that admits "";
• the warning names the undescribed plugins and not the described one — without that last assertion, a message listing every plugin would pass;
• silence when every plugin declares one, since a warning on every boot of a correct install trains an operator to ignore the one that matters.

Break-verified: warning on every plugin instead of the undescribed ones fails two tests.

Note

packages/nextly/src/plugins/schema/caching.test.ts fails 2 tests here and on origin/main alike — pre-existing, unrelated call path.

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[mobeenabdullah]

@codex please review this PR

[chatgpt-codex-connector]

Codex Review: Didn't find any major issues. Bravo.

Reviewed commit: 99e92b090b

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