Learning MCollective

Chapter 20. Creating Other Plugins

MCollective allows you to create plugins to replace or enhance much of the built-in functionality. This chapter covers most of the plugin types, where you can find examples to get you started, and the subdirectory where you should place your newly created plugins. 

For example, if you are creating an auditing plugin, you would take these steps:

$ mco plugin generate agent myagent actions=myfunction
Created plugin directory : myagent
Created DDL file : myagent/agent/myfunction.ddl
Created Agent file : myagent/agent/myfunction.rb

$ cd myagent
$ mkdir audit
$ $EDITOR audit/myaudit.rb

Table 20-1 shows a list of all the plugin types, and which directory underneath myagent/ you should put the file you create. We already discussed the first two (agent and application) in Chapter 5.

Table 20-1. MCollective plugin types

Plugin type	Documentation	Subdirectory
Server agent	http://docs.puppetlabs.com/mcollective/simplerpc/agents.html	agent
Client	http://docs.puppetlabs.com/mcollective/reference/plugins/application.html	application
Data plugin	http://docs.puppetlabs.com/mcollective/reference/plugins/data.html	data
Fact plugin	http://docs.puppetlabs.com/mcollective/reference/plugins/facts.html	facts
Auditing	http://docs.puppetlabs.com/mcollective/simplerpc/auditing.html	audit
Validator	http://docs.puppetlabs.com/mcollective/reference/plugins/validator.html	validator
Discovery	http://docs.puppetlabs.com/mcollective/reference/plugins/discovery.html ...