phonegap plugins - What is the cordova_plugins.json file for? Cordova is requesting it at initialization

Question

I am trying to debug what the cordova_plugins.json file is used for?

I am using multiple plugins so far and I have never interacted with this file. I want to figure out why cordova makes an xhr request for this file at initialization.

When looking at my console I keep seeing this 404 error every time I test my app in Chrome and like to understand why this file is necessary.

Answer 1

It seems like a feature introduced in Cordova 2.6.0, at least I just noticed in this version. At this point I could not find any documentation and I don't have many details on it, but right now I solved the 404 issue adding a dummy cordova_plugins.json file to the root of my project.

As it expects a valid json file I added the following content to the file: "just a dummy file required by Cordova 2.6.0"