Writing plugins in Go

Kong Gateway supports Go plugin development through the Go PDK library, which provides Go bindings for Kong Gateway.

To write a Kong Gateway plugin in Go, you need to:

1. Define a structure type to hold configuration.
2. Write a New() function to create instances of your structure.
3. Add methods to that structure to handle phases.
4. Include the go-pdk/server sub-library.
5. Add a main() function that calls server.StartServer(New, Version, Priority).
6. Compile as an executable with go build.

See the Go PDK repository for examples of plugins built with Go.

Configuration reference for the Go PDK.

Struct

The plugin you write needs a way to handle incoming configuration data from the data store or the Admin API. You can use a struct to create a schema of the incoming data.

type MyConfig struct {
    Path   string
    Reopen bool
}

Because this plugin will be processing configuration data, you are going to want to control encoding using the encoding/json package. Go fields that start with a capital letter can be exported, making them accessible outside of the current package, including by the encoding/json package. If you want the fields to have a different name in the data store, add tags to the fields in your struct.

type MyConfig struct {
    Path   string `json:"my_file_path"`
    Reopen bool   `json:"reopen"`
}

New() constructor

The plugin must define a function called New. This function should instantiate the MyConfig struct and return it as an interface.

func New() interface{} {
    return &MyConfig{}
}

main() function

Each plugin is compiled as a standalone executable. Include github.com/Kong/go-pdk in the imports list, and add a main() function:

func main () {
  server.StartServer(New, Version, Priority)
}

Executables can be placed somewhere in your path (for example, /usr/local/bin). For example, the -h flag shows a usage help message:

my-plugin -h

Output:

Usage of my-plugin:
  -dump
        Dump info about plugins
  -help
        Show usage info
  -kong-prefix string
        Kong prefix path (specified by the -p argument commonly used in the Kong CLI) (default "/usr/local/kong")

When you run the plugin without arguments, it creates a socket file within the kong-prefix and the executable name, appending .socket. For example, if the executable is my-plugin, the socket file would be /usr/local/kong/my-plugin.socket.

Phase handlers

In Kong Gateway Lua plugins, you can implement custom logic to be executed at various phases of the request processing lifecycle. For example, to execute custom Go code during the access phase, create a function named Access with the following function signature:

func (conf *MyConfig) Access (kong *pdk.PDK) {
  ...
}

You can implement custom logic during the following phases using the same function signature:

• certificate
• rewrite
• access
• response
• preread
• log

The presence of the Response handler automatically enables the buffered proxy mode.

Version and priority

You can define the version number and priority of execution by declaring the following constants within the plugin code:

const Version = "1.0.0"
const Priority = 1

Kong Gateway executes plugins from highest priority to lowest.

To load plugins using the kong.conf configuration file, you have to map existing Kong Gateway properties to aspects of your plugin. Here are two examples of loading plugins within kong.conf:

pluginserver_names = my-plugin,other-one

pluginserver_my_plugin_socket = /usr/local/kong/my-plugin.socket
pluginserver_my_plugin_start_cmd = /usr/local/bin/my-plugin
pluginserver_my_plugin_query_cmd = /usr/local/bin/my-plugin -dump

pluginserver_other_one_socket = /usr/local/kong/other-one.socket
pluginserver_other_one_start_cmd = /usr/local/bin/other-one
pluginserver_other_one_query_cmd = /usr/local/bin/other-one -dump

The socket and start command settings coincide with their defaults and can be omitted:

pluginserver_names = my-plugin,other-one
pluginserver_my_plugin_query_cmd = /usr/local/bin/my-plugin -dump
pluginserver_other_one_query_cmd = /usr/local/bin/other-one -dump