Lookup Plugins

Introduction

Lookup plugins are a way to extend the functionality of Jerakia lookups.

Within a lookup we have access to both the request and all scope data sent by the requestor. Having access to read and modify these gives us a great deal of flexibility. Jerakia policies are written in Ruby DSL so there is nothing stopping you from putting any amount of functionality directly in the lookup. However, that makes for rather long and complex policies and isn’t easy to share or re-use. The recommended way therefore to add extra functionality to a lookup is to use the plugin mechanism.

Custom lookup plugins are installed into the plugindir location in the configuration and are searched relative to this path as jerakia/lookup/plugin/<name>.rb. Core plugins are installed with the main code base but used in the same way.

To use a plugin in a lookup it must be loaded using the :use parameter to the lookup block, for example to load the hiera plugin into your lookup you need to format your lookup block as;

lookup :default, :use => :hiera do
  ...
end

If you want to use more than one plugin, the argument to :use can also be an array

lookup :default, :use => [ :hiera, :mystuff ] do
  ...
end

Once a plugin is loaded into the lookup, if the method autorun exists within the plugin then it is executed automatically. It exposes it’s other methods in the plugin.name namespace. For example, to call a method called mymethod in the mystuff plugin;

lookup :default, :use => :hiera do
  ...
  plugin.myplugin.mymethod
end

Lookup Plugins

Introduction

Further reading