Correct way to manage custom plugins (install, update, uninstall them)

[mikyll]

I'm messing around with custom plugins, and I've been reading some documentation pages (mostly from Kong Gateway - Develop Custom Plugins and Kong Ingress Controller - Custom Plugins).

However, there's something that keeps puzzling me:

• what's the proper way to try/test custom plugins?
• is there a way to update custom plugins code base, a part from uninstalling and reinstalling Kong completely?

This section "Deploying custom plugins" suggests to pass the values.yaml file to helm install command, but that (if I'm not wrong) means you have to provide your custom plugins during the installation of Kong.

I've tried providing them to helm upgrade, and it works but only if a plugin isn't already installed. I don't know how to update an already existing custom plugin or uninstall it. And that becomes kind of an issue (actually more like a little and annoying obstacle) when I'm trying to see if my ✨shining new plugin✨ works as expected.

As a temporary solution I've created a script that automatically uninstalls and reinstalls Kong and Kubernetes resources, to include the updated custom plugin, but it feels a little uncomfortable, is there a better approach?