without a token, someone could send a malicious pull request that changes the .drone.yml and triggers builds, deployments, etc. This would be a security issue.
drone does not know what an individual plugin is or does. It treats all plugins equally, and only concerns itself with starting the container and collecting the logs and exit code.
There are no plans to include this as a core feature in the 1.0 release at this time. The reason is that, for me, it is not clear how we decide when a repository has permission to trigger a downstream build for another repository. Any solution we implement in drone core would need to be rock solid with strong security guarantees, and at this time I do not have a solution for this problem.
The drone API supports passing build arguments to downstream builds, which are exposed to the pipeline as environment variables.
I do not think the downstream plugin provides the ability to set the parameters. So you would have to work with the plugin maintainers to add that capability. Alternatively, you can simply curl the drone endpoint in your pipeline script:
curl -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer {token}" https://drone.company.com/api/repos/{owner}/{repo}/builds/{build}?ENV_VAR_1={value}&ENV_VAR_2={value}&...
Thanks, I think the way to deal with Drone API is more suitable than plugins/downstream in our case. I can simply write a script to transfer the new variables.