1. Enhancing Cloud Foundry with CLI Plugins
Jonathan Berkhahn,
Simon Leung, IBM
@_simonleung

2. What are Cloud Foundry CLI Plugins?
An extensible framework to add novel functionality and value to the Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface
Allow CF users, developers, admins to add new commands
Arbitrary functionality; interact with CF or infrastructure on top
Plugin framework for interaction between plugin and CLI
Golang Binary
Implements the CLI plugin interface
Documentation and examples available at github.com/cloudfoundry/cli/plugin_examples

3. What can CLI Plugins be used for?
Users interacting with apps
Managing app deployment, i.e. blue-green deploy
Interacting with apps directly
Admins interacting with CF deployments
Updating configuration of CF resources
Developers testing new CF features
Testbed for up and coming new features
Development tools for ease of use

4. Plugin Use Case: CF Stack-Changer
Lucid version of Ubuntu being sunset
Many container backends running on CF use Lucid
Every running app on a Cloud Foundry needs to be switched
Without Plugins
Switch every app manually
Writing a script isn’t much better
Heavy-duty scripting to hit all the apps under all the orgs on an entire Cloud Foundry
Script has to be distributed to multiple possible environments

5. CF Stack-Changer

6. Plugin Use Case: V3_Beta
Version 3 of the CF API being rolled out experimentally
New endpoints, abstractions for pushing, listing apps
Volatile API as development continues 3
Without Plugins
Write curl requests manually
Hard to keep up with evolving API

7. V3_Beta Easier than manually writing curl requests
Easier to distribute than scripts
Easy to update the plugin when the API changes

8. Distributing CLI Plugins

9. How would users discover and install my plugins?
Distributing?
How would users discover and install my plugins?

10. Problem: Hassle to download Discovering the plugin
Binary file
Problem:
Hassle to download
Discovering the plugin
> cf install-plugin <PLUGIN_BINARY>

11. Problem: Discovering the plugin
From URL
Problem:
Discovering the plugin
> cf install-plugin <URL_TO_PLUGIN>

12. Plugin Repository Find and install plugins with only 2 commands!
cf repo-plugins
cf install-plugin

13. What is a plugin repository?
A server that CLI interact with to browse and install plugins
Multiple repos can be tracked.

14. 2 repositories being tracked by CLI

15. What is a plugin repository?
A server that CLI interact with to browse and install plugins
Multiple repos can be tracked.
Anyone can host a plugin repo.

16. Clone and start hosting your own repository

17. Run repo and add URL to CLI

18. What is a plugin repository?
A server the CLI interact with to browse and install plugins
Multiple repos can be tracked.
Anyone can host a plugin repo.
Users find/install plugin without leaving CLI

19. Install plugin directly from repository

20. Bonus: Creating a plugin

21. Plugin Minimum Implementation
GetMetadata()
Meta data for all commands in the plugin
Run()
Entry point for plugin main function
main()
bootstrapping the plugin object `plugin.Start(OBJECT)`
Show code

22. Run()
GetMetadata()
Main()

29. Questions?

30. Plugin Examples