61 lines
3.6 KiB
Markdown
61 lines
3.6 KiB
Markdown
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### External Plugins
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External plugins are external programs that are built outside of Telegraf that
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can run through an `execd` plugin. These external plugins allow for more flexibility
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compared to internal Telegraf plugins.
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- External plugins can be written in any language (internal Telegraf plugins can only written in Go)
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- External plugins can access to libraries not written in Go
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- Utilize licensed software that isn't available to the open source community
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- Can include large dependencies that would otherwise bloat Telegraf
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### External Plugin Guidelines
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The guidelines of writing external plugins would follow those for our general [input](docs/INPUTS.md),
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[output](docs/OUTPUTS.md), [processor](docs/PROCESSORS.md), and [aggregator](docs/AGGREGATOR.md) plugins.
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Please reference the documentation on how to create these plugins written in Go.
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#### Execd Go Shim
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For Go plugins, there is a [Execd Go Shim](plugins/common/shim) that will make it trivial to extract an internal input, processor, or output plugin from the main Telegraf repo out to a stand-alone repo. This shim This allows anyone to build and run it as a separate app using one of the `execd`plugins:
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- [inputs.execd](/plugins/inputs/execd)
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- [processors.execd](/plugins/processors/execd)
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- [outputs.execd](/plugins/outputs/execd)
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Follow the [Steps to externalize a plugin](plugins/common/shim#steps-to-externalize-a-plugin) and [Steps to build and run your plugin](plugins/common/shim#steps-to-build-and-run-your-plugin) to properly with the Execd Go Shim
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#### Step-by-Step guidelines
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This is a guide to help you set up your plugin to use it with `execd`
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1. Write your Telegraf plugin. Depending on the plugin, follow the guidelines on how to create the plugin itself using InfluxData's best practices:
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- [Input Plugins](/docs/INPUTS.md)
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- [Processor Plugins](/docs/PROCESSORS.md)
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- [Aggregator Plugins](/docs/AGGREGATORS.md)
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- [Output Plugins](docs/OUTPUTS.md)
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2. If your plugin is written in Go, include the steps for the [Execd Go Shim](plugins/common/shim#steps-to-build-and-run-your-plugin)
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1. Move the project to an external repo, it's recommended to preserve the path
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structure, (but not strictly necessary). eg if your plugin was at
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`plugins/inputs/cpu`, it's recommended that it also be under `plugins/inputs/cpu`
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in the new repo. For a further example of what this might look like, take a
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look at [ssoroka/rand](https://github.com/ssoroka/rand) or
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[danielnelson/telegraf-execd-openvpn](https://github.com/danielnelson//telegraf-execd-openvpn)
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1. Copy [main.go](./example/cmd/main.go) into your project under the `cmd` folder.
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This will be the entrypoint to the plugin when run as a stand-alone program, and
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it will call the shim code for you to make that happen. It's recommended to
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have only one plugin per repo, as the shim is not designed to run multiple
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plugins at the same time (it would vastly complicate things).
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1. Edit the main.go file to import your plugin. Within Telegraf this would have
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been done in an all.go file, but here we don't split the two apart, and the change
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just goes in the top of main.go. If you skip this step, your plugin will do nothing.
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eg: `_ "github.com/me/my-plugin-telegraf/plugins/inputs/cpu"`
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1. Optionally add a [plugin.conf](./example/cmd/plugin.conf) for configuration
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specific to your plugin. Note that this config file **must be separate from the
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rest of the config for Telegraf, and must not be in a shared directory where
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Telegraf is expecting to load all configs**. If Telegraf reads this config file
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it will not know which plugin it relates to. Telegraf instead uses an execd config
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block to look for this plugin.
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