#2090 - Introduce extensibility to Chainloop CLI

[gr0]

This is an experimental approach to #2090 - the part of the whole solution providing the framework part.

I also created an example plugin that can be used for testing https://github.com/gr0/chainloop_example_plugin - everything that is needed is described in the readme file of the plugin.

[jiparis]

I'm wondering if we can use a Cobra struct here. That way, there's no need to parse this structure in createPluginCommand, just use them natively.

[gr0]

I've been looking into that and I may be mistaken, but it seems that we can't be sure we will fully serialize and deserialize the cobra.Command - we have pointers there and we have functions there, we could even have unexported variables potentially and that won't be serialized. But maybe I'm missing something?

[jiparis]

Thanks @gr0 . This is looking great. I've left a couple of comments.

[jiparis]

There are some variables in root.go that get their values from some persistent flags. They should be passed as well. For example apiToken, flagDebug, flagOutputFormat, cpPanelAPI, etc.
Not sure what's the best pattern, but plugins might need to use them.

[gr0]

Good point, I'll review which ones we should pass and if we are missing anything that needs to be added.

[gr0]

For now I added the token, CP and CAS API addresses. I'm not sure if there is anything that we need more. If you have anything in mind let me know.

[migmartri]

does it need to be executable? Is this a requirement of the plugin library, I wasn't aware of it.

How did you build the test plugin? I did

go build -o ~/.config/chainloop/plugins/test-plugin main.go

in the test plugin you pasted and it doesn't load it.

 go run main.go plugin ls
WRN API contacted in insecure mode
No plugins installed

if I make it executable I get this error

go run main.go plugin ls
2025-06-05T16:15:53.855+0200 [DEBUG] plugin: starting plugin: path=/Users/miguelmartinez/.config/chainloop/plugins/test-plugin args=["/Users/miguelmartinez/.config/chainloop/plugins/test-plugin"]
2025-06-05T16:15:53.856+0200 [WARN]  plugin: plugin failed to exit gracefully
WRN API contacted in insecure mode
No plugins installed

[gr0]

In my case I was just building an example with:

go build -o plugin-one ./cmd/

Let me create an example repository with a plugin, so I can show the whole implementation. I'll prepare something for tomorrow.

[gr0]

Btw - can you try running the compiled Chainloop binary and listing the plugins - I was testing using the locally compiled binary using goreleased. I'm wondering if that can be the case, I'll try running in a similar way you did.

[gr0]

Hmmm I managed to run the code even with the following command:

go run main.go plugin list

And the output was:

┌─────────┬─────────┬─────────────────────────────────────────────────┬──────────────┐
│ NAME    │ VERSION │ DESCRIPTION                                     │ COMMANDS     │
├─────────┼─────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ example │ 3.0.0   │ GitHub rulesets plugin with JSON output support │ 1 command(s) │
└─────────┴─────────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────────┴──────────────┘
┌─────────┬─────────────────┐
│ PLUGIN  │ COMMAND         │
├─────────┼─────────────────┤
│ example │ example-hello   │
└─────────┴─────────────────┘

I'll create a simple repo with a plugin tomorrow morning, so you can test it on your machine.

[gr0]

@migmartri I created this repository: https://github.com/gr0/chainloop_example_plugin - have a look there, it is a very basic plugin, which in my case works:

$ ./dist/cli_darwin_arm64_v8.0/chainloop plugin list
┌──────────────────────────┬─────────┬───────────────────────────┬──────────────┐
│ NAME                     │ VERSION │ DESCRIPTION               │ COMMANDS     │
├──────────────────────────┼─────────┼───────────────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ example-chainloop-plugin │ 1.0.0   │ GitHub example CLI plugin │ 1 command(s) │
└──────────────────────────┴─────────┴───────────────────────────┴──────────────┘
┌──────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────┐
│ PLUGIN                   │ COMMAND                  │
├──────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ example-chainloop-plugin │ example-chainloop-plugin │

$ ./dist/cli_darwin_arm64_v8.0/chainloop plugin describe --name example-chainloop-plugin
┌──────────────────────────┬─────────┬───────────────────────────┬──────────────┐
│ NAME                     │ VERSION │ DESCRIPTION               │ COMMANDS     │
├──────────────────────────┼─────────┼───────────────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ example-chainloop-plugin │ 1.0.0   │ GitHub example CLI plugin │ 1 command(s) │
└──────────────────────────┴─────────┴───────────────────────────┴──────────────┘
┌──────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────┬──────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────┐
│ PLUGIN                   │ COMMAND                  │ DESCRIPTION      │ USAGE                              │
├──────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────┼──────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────┤
│ example-chainloop-plugin │ example-chainloop-plugin │ Greet with hello │ chainloop example-chainloop-plugin │
└──────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────┴──────────────────┴────────────────────────────────────┘
┌────────┬─────────┬──────┬─────────────┬──────┬─────────┬──────────┐
│ PLUGIN │ COMMAND │ FLAG │ DESCRIPTION │ TYPE │ DEFAULT │ REQUIRED │
├────────┼─────────┼──────┼─────────────┼──────┼─────────┼──────────┤
└────────┴─────────┴──────┴─────────────┴──────┴─────────┴──────────┘

And finally:

$ ./dist/cli_darwin_arm64_v8.0/chainloop example-chainloop-plugin
Hello, World!%