How can a npm package ever possibly affect the beforeLaunch stage of the execution for Protractor?

Question

While looking through the code in the protractor-jasmine2-screenshot-reporter npm package I noticed that it contains a beforeLaunch function, which is exported with the rest of the functions.

I know that the lifecycle stages run in the following order so my question is: How can this reporter ever possibly affect the beforeLaunch stage of the execution when the jasmine object itself isn't available until the onPrepare stage?

--- beforeLaunch           
    --- onPrepare          (set in conf) ***reporters initialized here
      --- jasmineStarted   (set in reporter)
        --- beforeAll
         --- suiteStarted  (set in reporter)
          --- specStarted  (set in reporter)
           --- beforeEach  (set in testFile)
           +++ afterEach   (set in testFile)
          +++ specDone     (set in reporter)
         +++ suiteDone     (set in reporter)
        +++ afterAll
      +++ jasmineDone      (set in reporter)
    +++ onComplete         (set in conf)
+++ afterLaunch

Code from protractor-jasmine2-screenshot-reporter

function Jasmine2ScreenShotReporter(opts) {

  this.beforeLaunch = function (callback) {
  };

  this.afterLaunch = function (callback) {
  };

  this.jasmineStarted = function (suiteInfo) {
  };

  this.suiteStarted = function (suite) {
  };

  this.suiteDone = function (suite) {
  };

  this.specStarted = function (spec) {
  };

  this.specDone = function (spec) {
  };

  this.jasmineDone = function () {
  };

  return this;
}

I possible I have fundamentally misunderstood some behavior here but hope someone can shed some light on this for me.

Answer 1

Protractor uses extra plugin hooks and resolves these in addition to the Jasmine hooks. These are usually resolved in Protractor's runner. You can read up on the plugins here: https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/master/lib/plugins.ts#L25

So for example, onPrepare plugin is checked in the config (https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/selenium4/lib/runner.ts#L63) and executed by the runner (https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/selenium4/lib/runner.ts#L82). These two files referencing the runner is for the selenium 4 upgrade branch. It is easier to look at these versions since they do not have a chain of thenable promises.