How to make Go web app plugin?

Getting Help
1

Hi all,

I’ve been thinking of a way to implement plugin ability for a Go web app, but got nothing out of my mind.

Any suggestions about how it is generally constructed and where to put hooks?

Thanks!

2

What do you consider a “plugin” to be?

How does it differ from traditional middleware that modifies the request/response - e.g. something that accepts a http.Handler and returns one - func (http.Handler) http.Handler that wraps middleware/the endpoint handler is pretty common.

You can wrap them per-route with http.Handle("/route", YourMiddleware(YourHandler)) or you can wrap a http.ServeMux itself (since it implements http.Handler). Libs like https://github.com/justinas/alice provide a way to chain middleware in a reusable manner.

Are you thinking of a different approach? Would your approach be compatible with existing std. lib. interfaces?

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3

For traditional plugins, take a look at github. com/natefinch/pie - if you can sort out the interface you need, that’s an easy and clean way to implement plugins.

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4

I’m assuming when you say plugin system you mean something that allows you to enable/disable 3rd party functionality on the fly. Yeah this seems like a tough problem to solve with a language like Go. The only two solutions I can think of are:

  1. Communicating with other applications over sockets.
  2. Generating source code, then rebuilding and restarting the application.
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5

Thank you all for replies!

I’ve found following two plugin systems that are interested me, which I can be inspired of:

So like @evantbyrne mentions, the first one is let my web app talks to 3rd-party web services, and second one is directly add source code by convention.

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6

Didn’t Go 1.5 introduce support for dynamic loading of shared objects? I’ve been meaning to take a look at it from the point of view of this particular problem, but haven’t yet.

Anyone?

8

I don’t believe that aspect has been implemented yet. Only being able to build C libraries with exported functions, and dynamic objects. But not the ability to dynamically load within a running Go application.

9

Right. I was remembering something mentioned in the design document, but wasn’t implemented for Go 1.5.

10

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