Managing plugins with decK

Adding or managing plugins is a common use case for platform teams. The deck file command allows you to add or update a plugin configuration programmatically.

If the plugin being added already exists, the add-plugin command won’t edit the plugin unless the --overwrite flag is provided, or overwrite: true is specified in the plugin configuration file.

The deck file add-plugins command outputs the patched file to stdout by default. You can provide a path to a file using -o ./config.yaml to write the updated configuration to a file on disk.

You can run the following examples using deck file add-plugins -s ./kong.yaml plugin1.yaml.

Multiple plugin definition files can be passed to the command e.g. deck file add-plugins -s ./kong.yaml plugin1.yaml plugin1.yaml.

# plugin.yaml
add-plugins:
  - selectors:
      - $..services[*]
    overwrite: false
    plugins:
      - name: request-termination
        config:
          status_code: 403
          message: Scheduled maintenance in progress

The deck file add-plugins command configures a complete set of plugin configuration. To edit specific values, you can use the deck file patch command.

To update the request-termination plugin above to return a different message:

patches:
  - selectors:
      - $.services[*].plugins[?(@.name=='request-termination')].config
    values:
      message: "Installing new bits and bytes"

For more information, see the deck file patch documentation.