Introduction to developing plugins

STYX

Introduction to developing plugins

This is a quick guide to developing plugins for the Styx platform. It is written with the assumption that you are already familiar with running Styx. If not, please consult the Quick-start guide.

We have not yet released our modules online as maven dependencies, but this is coming soon!

For now, please build the project locally using one of the following commands:

• either mvn install -Plinux -Dmaven.test.skip=true
• or mvn install -Pmacosx -Dmaven.test.skip=true

and add the following dependency to your pom.xml file.

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.hotels.styx</groupId>
  <artifactId>styx-api</artifactId>
  <version>0.7-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

If, for some reason, you are unable to use maven, the modules can be found in the lib/ folder inside the Styx release.

Please refer to this example plugin code to familiarise yourself with the plugin SPI.

Step-by-Step

1. Create a Java project in your IDE of choice.

2. Ensure that you have the required dependencies (see maven instructions above).

3. Copy the classes from example plugin code into your project. For more information, consult the plugins documentation.

4. Modify the example to suit your interests.

5. After compilation, bundle your plugin and any dependencies into a JAR file. Please note the location of the JAR file for use in configuring Styx.

6. Add the following section to your Styx config file:

    plugins:
      active: nameOfYourPlugin
      all:
        - name: nameOfYourPlugin
          factory:
            class: "com.hotels.styx.ExamplePluginFactory"
            classPath: "<path-to-plugin>/yourPluginJar.jar"
          config:
            requestHeaderValue: "example-plugin-modified-request"
            responseHeaderValue: "example-plugin-modified-response"
   

7. Run Styx (see Quick-start guide).

8. Confirm that the plugin is configured by checking the admin interface and finding it in the enabled list.

9. Send a request to localhost:8080 to test your plugin. In our example, the request should have appended the header myRequestHeader=example-plugin-modified-request and the response should have appended the header myResponseHeader=example-plugin-modified-response

10. Note that you can use the styx-test-api with a test framework of your choice to write end-to-end tests that run your plugin in a Styx server.