The lab has 3 main purposes detailed below. The goal is to enable command line and browser-based management of community plugins.
Allows you to extract app and plugin templates, as a boilerplate for developing your app or plugin.
li3 library extract app my_app
li3 library extract plugin my_plugin
li3 library push
li3 library find
Although the Lab is the official plugin repository for Lithium, you can create your own plugin repository by downloading and installing the li3_lab plugin. Before beginning, make sure you have downloaded and installed CouchDB.
li3 server install
When we begun working on lithium there was no sufficient package manager for PHP available. The lab was our take on providing such a service and was lead by gwoo. A server was actually running for some time at lab.lithify.me. However when other solutions were favored by the community we stopped develiping lab further.
Still the code is here and wildly functional, with absolut great test coverage. It's left here - intact - should we ever decide that other solutions aren't ours.
There is a stale branch where the lab server's database was ported over to MongoDb, which is worth taking a look at.
Some of the code here (mainly the library command) was originally part of lithium. It has been extracted and moved here (together with its tests).