The core of the Heka engine is written in the Go programming language. Heka supports six different types of plugins (inputs, splitters, decoders, filters, encoders, and outputs), which are also written in Go. This document will try to provide enough information for developers to extend Heka by implementing their own custom plugins. It assumes a small amount of familiarity with Go, although any reasonably experienced programmer will probably be able to follow along with no trouble.
NOTE: Heka also supports the use of security sandboxed Lua code for implementing the core logic of decoder, filter, and encoder plugins. This document only covers the development of Go plugins. You can learn more about sandboxed plugins in the Sandbox section.
Each Heka plugin type performs a specific task. Inputs receive input from the outside world and inject the data into the Heka pipeline. Splitters slice the input stream into individual records. Decoders turn binary data into Message objects that Heka can process. Filters perform arbitrary processing of Heka message data. Encoders serialize Heka messages into arbitrary byte streams. Outputs send data from Heka back to the outside world. Each specific plugin has some custom behaviour, but it also shares behaviour w/ every other plugin of that type. A UDPInput and a TCPInput listen on the network differently, and a LogstreamerInput (reading files off the file system) doesn’t listen on the network at all, but all of these inputs need to interact w/ the Heka system to access data structures, gain access to decoders to which we pass our incoming data, respond to shutdown and other system events, etc.
To support this all Heka plugins except encoders actually consist of two parts: the plugin itself, and an accompanying “plugin runner”. Inputs have an InputRunner, splitters have a SplitterRunner, decoders have a DecoderRunner, filters have a FilterRunner, and Outputs have an OutputRunner. The plugin itself contains the plugin-specific behaviour, and is provided by the plugin developer. The plugin runner contains the shared (by type) behaviour, and is provided by Heka. When Heka starts a plugin, it first creates and configures a plugin instance of the appropriate type, then it creates a plugin runner instance of the appropriate type, passing in the plugin.
For inputs, filters, and outputs, there’s a 1:1 correspondence between sections specified in the config file and running plugin instances. This is not the case for splitters, decoders and encoders, however. Configuration sections for splitter, decoder and encoder plugins register possible configurations, but actual running instances of these types aren’t created until they are used by input or output plugins.
Heka uses a slightly modified version of TOML as its configuration file format (see: Configuring hekad), and provides a simple mechanism through which plugins can integrate with the configuration loading system to initialize themselves from settings in hekad’s config file.
The minimal shared interface that a Heka plugin must implement in order to use
the config system is (unsurprisingly) Plugin, defined in
pipeline_runner.go:
type Plugin interface {
Init(config interface{}) error
}
During Heka initialization an instance of every plugin listed in the
configuration file will be created. The TOML configuration for each plugin
will be parsed and the resulting configuration object will be passed in to the
above specified Init method. The argument is of type interface{}. By
default the underlying type will be *pipeline.PluginConfig, a map object
that provides config data as key/value pairs. There is also a way for plugins
to specify a custom struct to be used instead of the generic PluginConfig
type (see Custom Plugin Config Structs). In either case, the config object will
be already loaded with values read in from the TOML file, which your plugin
code can then use to initialize itself. The input, filter, and output plugins
will then be started so they can begin processing messages. The splitter,
decoder, and encoder instances will be thrown away, with new ones created as
needed when requested by input (for splitter and decoder) or output (for
encoder) plugins.
As an example, imagine we’re writing a filter that will deliver messages to a
specific output plugin, but only if they come from a list of approved hosts.
Both ‘hosts’ and ‘output’ would be required in the plugin’s config section.
Here’s one version of what the plugin definition and Init method might
look like:
type HostFilter struct {
hosts map[string]bool
output string
}
// Extract hosts value from config and store it on the plugin instance.
func (f *HostFilter) Init(config interface{}) error {
var (
hostsConf interface{}
hosts []interface{}
host string
outputConf interface{}
ok bool
)
conf := config.(pipeline.PluginConfig)
if hostsConf, ok = conf["hosts"]; !ok {
return errors.New("No 'hosts' setting specified.")
}
if hosts, ok = hostsConf.([]interface{}); !ok {
return errors.New("'hosts' setting not a sequence.")
}
if outputConf, ok = conf["output"]; !ok {
return errors.New("No 'output' setting specified.")
}
if f.output, ok = outputConf.(string); !ok {
return errors.New("'output' setting not a string value.")
}
f.hosts = make(map[string]bool)
for _, h := range hosts {
if host, ok = h.(string); !ok {
return errors.New("Non-string host value.")
}
f.hosts[host] = true
}
return nil
}
(Note that this is a bit of a contrived example. In practice, you would generally route messages to specific outputs using the Message Matcher Syntax.)
In the event that your plugin fails to initialize properly at startup, hekad
will exit. However, once hekad is running, if the plugin should fail (perhaps
because a network connection dropped, a file became unavailable, etc) then the
plugin will exit. If the plugin supports being restarted then Heka will
attempt to reset, reinitialize, and restart the plugin. If this fails, Heka
will try again up until the specified max_retries value. If the failure
continues beyond the maximum number of retries, or if the plugin didn’t
support restarting in the first place, then Heka will either shut down or, if
the plugin is a filter or an output with the can_exit setting set to true,
the plugin will be removed from operation and Heka will continue to run.
If the reinitialization and restarting is successful, then the retry count will be reset to zero and everything will continue to function as normal.
To add restart support to your plugin, you must implement the Restarting
interface defined in the config.go file:
type Restarting interface {
CleanupForRestart()
}
The CleanupForRestart method will be called when the plugin’s main run
method exits, a single time. This allows you a place to perform any additional
cleanup that might be necessary before attempting to reinitialize the plugin.
After this, the runner will repeatedly call the plugin’s Init method until it
initializes successfully. It will then resume running it unless it exits again
at which point the restart process will begin anew.
In simple cases it might be fine to get plugin configuration data as a generic map of keys and values, but if there are more than a couple of config settings then checking for, extracting, and validating the values quickly becomes a lot of work. Heka plugins can instead specify a schema struct for their configuration data, into which the TOML configuration will be decoded.
Plugins that wish to provide a custom configuration struct should implement
the HasConfigStruct interface defined in the config.go
file:
type HasConfigStruct interface {
ConfigStruct() interface{}
}
Any plugin that implements this method should return a struct that can act as
the schema for the plugin configuration. Heka’s config loader will then try to
decode the plugin’s TOML config into this struct. Note that this also gives
you a way to specify default config values; you just populate your config
struct as desired before returning it from the ConfigStruct method.
Let’s look at the code for Heka’s UdpOutput, which delivers messages to a UDP listener somewhere. The initialization code looks as follows:
// This is our plugin struct.
type UdpOutput struct {
*UdpOutputConfig
conn net.Conn
}
// This is our plugin's config struct
type UdpOutputConfig struct {
// Network type ("udp", "udp4", "udp6", or "unixgram"). Needs to match the
// input type.
Net string
// String representation of the address of the network connection to which
// we will be sending out packets (e.g. "192.168.64.48:3336").
Address string
// Optional address to use as the local address for the connection.
LocalAddress string `toml:"local_address"`
}
// Provides pipeline.HasConfigStruct interface.
func (o *UdpOutput) ConfigStruct() interface{} {
return &UdpOutputConfig{
Net: "udp",
}
}
// Initialize UDP connection
func (o *UdpOutput) Init(config interface{}) (err error) {
o.UdpOutputConfig = config.(*UdpOutputConfig) // assert we have the right config type
if o.Net == "unixgram" {
if runtime.GOOS == "windows" {
return errors.New("Can't use Unix datagram sockets on Windows.")
}
var unixAddr, lAddr *net.UnixAddr
unixAddr, err = net.ResolveUnixAddr(o.Net, o.Address)
if err != nil {
return fmt.Errorf("Error resolving unixgram address '%s': %s", o.Address,
err.Error())
}
if o.LocalAddress != "" {
lAddr, err = net.ResolveUnixAddr(o.Net, o.LocalAddress)
if err != nil {
return fmt.Errorf("Error resolving local unixgram address '%s': %s",
o.LocalAddress, err.Error())
}
}
if o.conn, err = net.DialUnix(o.Net, lAddr, unixAddr); err != nil {
return fmt.Errorf("Can't connect to '%s': %s", o.Address,
err.Error())
}
} else {
var udpAddr, lAddr *net.UDPAddr
if udpAddr, err = net.ResolveUDPAddr(o.Net, o.Address); err != nil {
return fmt.Errorf("Error resolving UDP address '%s': %s", o.Address,
err.Error())
}
if o.LocalAddress != "" {
lAddr, err = net.ResolveUDPAddr(o.Net, o.LocalAddress)
if err != nil {
return fmt.Errorf("Error resolving local UDP address '%s': %s",
o.Address, err.Error())
}
}
if o.conn, err = net.DialUDP(o.Net, lAddr, udpAddr); err != nil {
return fmt.Errorf("Can't connect to '%s': %s", o.Address,
err.Error())
}
}
return
}
In addition to specifying configuration options that are specific to your
plugin, it is also possible to use the config struct to specify default values
for any common configuration options that are processed by Heka, such as the
synchronous_decode option available to Input plugins, or the
ticker_interval and message_matcher values that are available to all
filter and output plugins. If a config struct contains a uint attribute called
TickerInterval, that will be used as a default ticker interval value (in
seconds) if none is supplied in the TOML. Similarly, if a config struct
contains a string attribute called MessageMatcher, that will be used as the
default message routing rule if none is specified in the configuration file.
There is an optional configuration interface called WantsName. It provides a a plugin access to its configured name before the runner has started. The SandboxFilter plugin uses the name to locate/load any preserved state before being run:
type WantsName interface {
SetName(name string)
}
There is also a similar WantsPipelineConfig interface that can be used if a plugin needs access to the active PipelineConfig or GlobalConfigStruct values in the ConfigStruct or Init methods:
type WantsPipelineConfig interface {
SetPipelineConfig(pConfig *pipeline.PipelineConfig)
}
Note that, in the case of inputs, filters, and outputs, these interfaces only need to be implemented if you need this information before the plugin is started. Once started, the plugin runner and a plugin helper will be passed in to the Run method, which make the plugin name and PipelineConfig struct available in other ways.
Input plugins are responsible for acquiring data from the outside world and injecting this data into the Heka pipeline. An input might be passively listening for incoming network data or actively scanning external sources (either on the local machine or over a network). The input plugin interface is:
type Input interface {
Run(ir InputRunner, h PluginHelper) (err error)
Stop()
}
The Run method is called when Heka starts and, if all is functioning as
intended, should not return until Heka is shut down. If a condition arises
such that the input can not perform its intended activity it should return
with an appropriate error, otherwise it should continue to run until a
shutdown event is triggered by Heka calling the input’s Stop method, at
which time any clean-up should be done and a clean shutdown should be
indicated by returning a nil error.
Inside the Run method, an input typically has three primary responsibilities:
The details of the first step are clearly entirely defined by the plugin’s intended input mechanism(s). Plugins can (and should!) spin up goroutines as needed to perform tasks such as listening on a network connection, making requests to external data sources, scanning machine resources and operational characteristics, reading files from a file system, etc.
For the second step, you need to get a SplitterRunner to which you can feed
your incoming data. This is available through the InputRunner’s
NewSplitterRunner method. NewSplitterRunner takes a single string argument
called token. This token is used to differentiate multiple SplitterRunner
instances from each other. If you have a simple input plugin that only needs a
single SplitterRunner, you can just pass an empty string (i.e. sr :=
ir.NewSplitterRunner("")). In more complicated scenarios you might want
multiple SplitterRunners, say one per goroutine, in which case you should pass
a unique identifier string in to each NewSplitterRunner call.
Splitting records efficiently is a surprisingly complicated process so the SplitterRunner interface has a number of methods:
type SplitterRunner interface {
PluginRunner
SetInputRunner(ir InputRunner)
Splitter() Splitter
SplitBytes(data []byte, del Deliverer) error
SplitStream(r io.Reader, del Deliverer) error
GetRemainingData() (record []byte)
GetRecordFromStream(r io.Reader) (int, []byte, error)
DeliverRecord(record []byte, del Deliverer)
KeepTruncated() bool
UseMsgBytes() bool
SetPackDecorator(decorator func(*PipelinePack))
}
Don’t let this scare you, however. SplitterRunner’s expose some internal
workings to be able to support advanced uses, but in most cases you only need
to deal with a few of the exposed methods. Specifically, you care about either
SplitStream or SplitBytes, and possibly about SetPackDecorator and
UseMsgBytes.
First we’ll examine the “Split” methods. As mentioned above, you’ll typically only want to use one or the other. Deciding which you want is straightforward. If your mechanism for getting data from the outside world is a stream object (an io.Reader, in Go terms), then you’ll want SplitStream. If not and you just end up with a byte slice of binary data, then you’ll want SplitBytes.
Note that both SplitStream and SplitBytes ask for a Deliverer object as
their second argument. Again, in simple cases you don’t need to worry about
this. If you’re only using a single SplitterRunner, you can just pass in nil
and Heka will take care of delivering the message to a decoder and/or the
message router appropriately. If you’re using multiple goroutines (and
therefore multiple SplitterRunners), however, you’ll typically want multiple
Deliverers, too. This is especially important if you want each separate
goroutine to have its own Decoder, so decoding can happen in parallel,
delegated to multiple cores on a single machine.
Like SplitterRunners, Deliverers are obtained from the InputRunner, using the
NewDeliverer method. And, like SplitterRunners, NewDeliverer takes a
single string identifier argument, which should be unique for each requested
deliverer. Usually a single SplitterRunner will be using a single Deliverer,
and the same token identifier will be used for each. You can see an example of
this in the TcpInput’s handleConnection code snippet a bit further down this
page.
If you’re using SplitBytes, then you’ll want to call it each time you have a new payload of data to process. It will return the number of bytes successfully consumed from the provided slice, and any relevant errors occurred while processing. It is up to the calling code to decide what to do in error cases, or when all of the data isn’t consumed.
If you’re using SplitStream, then the SplitStream call will block for as long as it is consuming data. When data processing pauses or stops, SplitStream will exit and return control back to the input, returning either nil or any relevant errors. Typically if nil is returned, you’ll want to call SplitStream again to continue processing the stream. Code such as the following is a common idiom:
var err error
for err == nil {
err = sr.SplitStream(r, nil)
}
Any errors encountered while processing the stream, including io.EOF, will be returned from the SplitStream call. It is up to the input code to decide how to proceed.
Finally, we’re ready for the third step, providing a “pack decorator” function to the SplitterRunner. Sometimes an input plugin would like to populate a Heka message with information specific to the input mechanism. The TcpInput, for instance, often wants to store the remote address of the TCP connection as a message’s Hostname field. Any provided pack decorator function will be called immediately before the PipelinePack is passed on for delivery, allowing the input to mutate the pack’s Message struct as desired. The TcpInput code that uses this feature looks like so:
func (t *TcpInput) handleConnection(conn net.Conn) {
raddr := conn.RemoteAddr().String()
host, _, err := net.SplitHostPort(raddr)
if err != nil {
host = raddr
}
deliverer := t.ir.NewDeliverer(host)
sr := t.ir.NewSplitterRunner(host)
defer func() {
conn.Close()
t.wg.Done()
deliverer.Done()
}()
if !sr.UseMsgBytes() {
packDec := func(pack *PipelinePack) {
pack.Message.SetHostname(raddr)
}
sr.SetPackDecorator(packDec)
}
The if !sr.UseMsgBytes() check before the SetPackDecorator call deserves
some explanation. Generally Heka receives input data in one of two flavors.
The first is standalone data, usually text, such as log files loaded from the
file system using a LogstreamerInput. This data is stored within a Message
struct, usually as the payload. Most decoder plugins, then, will expect to find
the raw input data in the Message payload, and will parse this data and mutate the
Message struct with extracted data.
The second flavor of input data is a binary blob, usually protocol buffers encoded, representing an entire Heka message. Clearly it doesn’t make much sense to store data representing a serialized Message struct within a Message struct, since it would overwrite itself upon deserialization. For this reason, PipelinePacks have a MsgBytes attribute that is used as a buffer for storing binary data that will be converted to a message. Certain decoder plugins, most notably the ProtobufDecoder, will expect to find input data in the pack.MsgBytes buffer, and will use this to create a new Message struct from scratch.
Splitters can specify via a config setting whether the data records they parse should be placed in the message payload of an existing Message struct or in the MsgBytes attribute of the enclosing PipelinePack, depending on what the accompanying decoder plugin expects. The UseMsgBytes method on the SplitterRunner will return true if the contained splitter plugin is putting the data in the MsgBytes buffer, or false if it is putting the data in the Message’s Payload field.
Now we can understand why the TcpInput is checking this before setting the pack decorator. When UseMsgBytes returns true, then the Message struct on that pack is going to be overwritten when decoding happens. There’s not much value in setting the Hostname field when it’s going to be clobbered shortly afterward.
Okay, that covers most of what you need to know about developing your own Heka input plugins. There’s one important final possibility to consider, however. In some cases, an input might fail to retrieve any data at all, so it has nothing to hand to the Splitter. Even so, it might still want to deliver a message containing information about the data retrieval failure itself. The HttpInput does this when an HTTP request fails completely due to network or other errors, for instance.
When this happens the input must obtain a fresh PipelinePack, manually populate the contained Message struct, and manually hand it over for delivery. Here’s the snippet in the HttpInput code that does this:
resp, err := httpClient.Do(req)
responseTime := time.Since(responseTimeStart)
if err != nil {
pack := <-hi.ir.InChan()
pack.Message.SetUuid(uuid.NewRandom())
pack.Message.SetTimestamp(time.Now().UnixNano())
pack.Message.SetType("heka.httpinput.error")
pack.Message.SetPayload(err.Error())
pack.Message.SetSeverity(hi.conf.ErrorSeverity)
pack.Message.SetLogger(url)
hi.ir.Deliver(pack)
return
}
As you can see, the pattern is simple. The PipelinePack supply is exposed via
a channel provided by the InputRunner’s InChan method, so we pull from
this channel to get a fresh pack. Then we populate the Message struct with any
relevant data we want to include, and we finish up by passing the pack in to
the InputRunner’s Deliver method for delivery. If we were using separate
Deliverers, then we would call the Deliver method on the relevant Deliverer
instance instead of on the InputRunner.
One important detail about this pattern, however: if for any reason your
plugin should pull a PipelinePack off of the input channel and not end up
passing it on to one of the Deliver methods, you must call
pack.Recycle() to free the pack up to be used again. Failure to do so will
eventually deplete the pool of PipelinePacks and will cause Heka to freeze.
In contrast to the relatively complicated SplitterRunner interface that is discussed in the Inputs section above, the actual Splitter plugins themselves are very simple. The basic Splitter interface consists of a single method:
// Splitter plugin interface type.
type Splitter interface {
FindRecord(buf []byte) (bytesRead int, record []byte)
}
The job of the FindRecord method is straightforward. It should scan
through the provided byte slice, from the beginning, looking for any
delimiters or appropriate indicators of a record boundary. It returns two
values, the number of bytes consumed from the input buffer, and a slice that
represents any record that was found. The bytesRead value should always
be returned, whether a record slice is returned or not. If the entire buffer
was scanned but no record was found, for instance, then bytesRead should be
len(buf).
Note that when a record is discovered, the returned slice can (and should, if possible) be a subsection of the input buffer. It’s recommended that FindRecord not do any unnecessary copying of the input data.
In many cases this is all that is required of a splitter plugin. In some
situations, however, records may include some headers and/or framing of some
sort, and additional processing of those headers might be called for. For
instance, Heka’s native Stream Framing can embed HMAC authenticated
message signing information in the message header, and the splitter needs to
be able to decide whether or not the authentication is valid. For this reason,
splitter plugins can implement an additional UnframingSplitter interface:
// UnframingSplitter is an interface optionally implemented by splitter
// plugins to remove and process any record framing that may have been used by
// the splitter.
type UnframingSplitter interface {
UnframeRecord(framed []byte, pack *PipelinePack) []byte
}
The FindRecord method of an UnframingSplitter should return the full record,
frame and all. Heka will then pass each framed record into the
UnframeRecord method, along with the PipelinePack into which the record
will be written. UnframeRecord should then extract the record framing, process
it as needed, and return a byte slice containing the unframed record that is
remaining. As with FindRecord, copying the data isn’t necessary, the unframed
record can safely refer to a subslice of the original framed record.
If the splitter examines the headers and decides that a given record is for
some reason not valid, such as for the use of an incorrect authentication key,
then it should return nil instead of the contained record. Additionally,
signing information can be written to the PipelinePack’s Signer attribute,
and this will be honored by the message_signer config setting available to
filter and output plugins.
Note that if UnframeRecord returns nil it does not need to call
pack.Recycle(). Heka will recognize that the pack isn’t going to be used and
will recycle it itself.
Decoder plugins are responsible for converting raw bytes containing message
data into actual Message struct objects that the Heka pipeline can process. As
with inputs and splitters, the Decoder interface is quite simple:
type Decoder interface {
Decode(pack *PipelinePack) (packs []*PipelinePack, err error)
}
There are two additional optional interfaces a decoder might decide to implement. The first provides the decoder access to its DecoderRunner object when it is started:
type WantsDecoderRunner interface {
SetDecoderRunner(dr DecoderRunner)
}
The second provides a notification to the decoder when the DecoderRunner is exiting:
type WantsDecoderRunnerShutdown interface {
Shutdown()
}
A decoder’s Decode method should extract raw message data from the
provided pack. Depending on the nature of the decoder, this might be found
either in the MsgBytes attribute of the PipelinePack, or in the contained
Message struct’s Payload field. Then it should try to deserialize and/or parse
this raw data, using the contained information to overwrite or populate the
pack’s Message struct.
If the decoding / parsing operation concludes successfully then Decode should
return a slice of PipelinePack pointers and a nil error value. The first item
in the returned slice (i.e. packs[0]) should be the pack that was passed
in to the method. If the decoding process needs to produce more than one
output pack, additional ones can be obtained from the DecoderRunner’s
NewPack method, and they should be appended to the returned slice of packs.
If decoding fails for any reason, then Decode should return a nil value for
the PipelinePack slice and an appropriate error value. Returning an error will
cause Heka to log an error message about the decoding failure. Additionally,
if the associated input plugin’s configuration set the send_decode_failure
value to true, the message will be tagged with decode_failure and
decode_error fields and delivered to the router.
Filter plugins are the message processing engine of the Heka system. They are used to examine and process message contents, and trigger events based on those contents in real time as messages are flowing through the Heka system.
The filter plugin interface is just a single method:
type Filter interface {
Run(r FilterRunner, h PluginHelper) (err error)
}
Like input plugins, filters have a Run method which accepts a runner and a
helper, and which should not return until shutdown unless there’s an error
condition. The similarities end there, however.
Filters should call runner.InChan() to gain access to the plugin’s input
channel. A filter’s input channel provides pointers to PipelinePack objects,
defined in pipeline_runner.go, each of which
contains what should be by now a fully populated Message struct from which the
filter can extract any desired information.
Upon processing a message, a filter plugin can perform any of three tasks:
message_matcher rules.To pass a message through unchanged, a filter can call
PluginHelper.Filter() or PluginHelper.Output() to access a filter or
output plugin, and then call that plugin’s Deliver() method, passing in
the PipelinePack.
To generate new messages, your filter must call
PluginHelper.PipelinePack(msgLoopCount int). The msgloopCount value to
be passed in should be obtained from the MsgLoopCount value on the pack
that you’re already holding, or possibly zero if the new message is being
triggered by a timed ticker instead of an incoming message. The PipelinePack
method will either return a pack ready for you to populate or nil if the loop
count is greater than the configured maximum value, as a safeguard against
inadvertently creating infinite message loops.
Once a pack has been obtained, a filter plugin can populate its Message
struct. The pack can then be passed along to a specific plugin (or plugins) as
above. Alternatively, the pack can be injected into the Heka message router
queue, where it will be checked against all plugin message matchers, by
passing it to the FilterRunner.Inject(pack *PipelinePack) method. Note
that, again as a precaution against message looping, a plugin will not be
allowed to inject a message which would get a positive response from that
plugin’s own matcher.
Sometimes a filter will take a specific action triggered by a single incoming
message. There are many cases, however, when a filter is merely collecting or
aggregating data from the incoming messages, and instead will be sending out
reports on the data that has been collected at specific intervals. Heka has
built-in support for this use case. Any filter (or output) plugin can include
a ticker_interval config setting (in seconds, integers only), which will
automatically be extracted by Heka when the configuration is loaded. Then from
within your plugin code you can call FilterRunner.Ticker() and you will
get a channel (type <-chan time.Time) that will send a tick at the
specified interval. Your plugin code can listen on the ticker channel and take
action as needed.
Observant readers might have noticed that, unlike the Input interface,
filters don’t need to implement a Stop method. Instead, Heka will
communicate a shutdown event to filter plugins by closing the input channel
from which the filter is receiving PipelinePacks. When this channel is closed,
a filter should perform any necessary clean-up and then return from the Run
method with a nil value to indicate a clean exit.
Finally, there is one very important point that all authors of filter plugins
should keep in mind: if you are not passing your received PipelinePack
object on to another filter or output plugin for further processing, then you
must call pack.Recycle() to tell Heka that you are through with the
pack. Failure to do so will cause Heka to not free up the packs for reuse,
exhausting the supply and eventually causing the entire pipeline to freeze.
Encoder plugins are the inverse of decoders. They convert Message structs into raw bytes that can be delivered to the outside world. Some encoders will serialize an entire Message struct, such as the Protobuf Encoder which uses Heka’s native protocol buffers format. Other encoders extract data from the message and insert it into a different format such as plain text or JSON.
The Encoder interface consists of one method:
type Encoder interface {
Encode(pack *PipelinePack) (output []byte, err error)
}
This method accepts a PiplelinePack containing a populated message object and returns a byte slice containing the data that should be sent out, or an error if serialization fails for some reason. If the encoder wishes to swallow an input message without generating any output (such as for batching, or because the message contains no new data) then nil should be returned for both the output and the error.
Unlike the other plugin types, encoders don’t have a PluginRunner, nor do they
run in their own goroutines. Outputs invoke encoders directly, by calling the
Encode method exposed on the OutputRunner. This has the same signature as the
Encoder interface’s Encode method, to which it will will delegate. If
use_framing is set to true in the output’s configuration, however, the
OutputRunner will prepend Heka’s Stream Framing to the generated binary
data.
Outputs can also directly access their encoder instance by calling OutputRunner.Encoder(). Encoders themselves don’t handle the stream framing, however, so it is recommended that outputs use the OutputRunner method instead.
Even though encoders don’t run in their own goroutines, it is possible that
they might need to perform some clean up at shutdown time. If this is so, the
encoder can implement the NeedsStopping interface:
type NeedsStopping interface {
Stop()
}
And the Stop method will be called during the shutdown sequence.
Finally we come to the output plugins, which are responsible for receiving
Heka messages and using them to generate interactions with the outside world.
The Output interface is nearly identical to the Filter interface:
type Output interface {
Run(or OutputRunner, h PluginHelper) (err error)
}
In fact, there are many ways in which filter and output plugins are similar.
Like filters, outputs should call the InChan method on the provided runner
to get an input channel, which will feed PipelinePacks. Like filters, outputs
should listen on this channel until it is closed, at which time they should
perform any necessary clean-up and then return. And, like filters, any output
plugin with a ticker_interval value in the configuration will use that
value to create a ticker channel that can be accessed using the runner’s
Ticker method. And, finally, outputs should also be sure to call
pack.Recycle() when they finish w/ a pack so that Heka knows the pack is
freed up for reuse.
The primary way that outputs differ from filters, of course, is that outputs need to serialize (or extract data from) the messages they receive and then send that data to an external destination. The serialization (or data extraction) should typically be performed by the output’s specified encoder plugin. The OutputRunner exposes the following methods to assist with this:
Encode(pack *PipelinePack) (output []byte, err error)
UsesFraming() bool
Encoder() (encoder Encoder)
The Encode method will use the specified encoder to convert the pack’s
message to binary data, then if use_framing was set to true in the
output’s configuration it will prepend Heka’s Stream Framing. The
UsesFraming method will tell you whether or not use_framing was set to
true. Finally, the Encoder method will return the actual encoder that was
registered. This is useful to check to make sure that an encoder was actually
registered, but generally you will want to use OutputRunner.Encode and not
Encoder.Encode, since the latter will not honor the output’s use_framing
specification.
The last step you have to take after implementing your plugin is to register
it with Heka so it can actually be configured and used. You do this by calling
the pipeline package’s RegisterPlugin function:
func RegisterPlugin(name string, factory func() interface{})
The name value should be a unique identifier for your plugin, and it
should end in one of “Input”, “Splitter”, “Decoder”, “Filter”, “Encoder”, or
“Output”, depending on the plugin type.
The factory value should be a function that returns an instance of your
plugin, usually a pointer to a struct, where the pointer type implements the
Plugin interface and the interface appropriate to its type (i.e.
Input, Splitter, Decoder, etc).
This sounds more complicated than it is. Here are some examples from Heka itself:
RegisterPlugin("UdpInput", func() interface{} {return new(UdpInput)})
RegisterPlugin("TcpInput", func() interface{} {return new(TcpInput)})
RegisterPlugin("ProtobufDecoder", func() interface{} {return new(ProtobufDecoder)})
RegisterPlugin("CounterFilter", func() interface{} {return new(CounterFilter)})
RegisterPlugin("StatFilter", func() interface{} {return new(StatFilter)})
RegisterPlugin("LogOutput", func() interface{} {return new(LogOutput)})
RegisterPlugin("FileOutput", func() interface{} {return new(FileOutput)})
It is recommended that RegisterPlugin calls be put in your Go package’s
init() function so that you
can simply import your package when building hekad and the package’s
plugins will be registered and available for use in your Heka config file.
This is made a bit easier if you use plugin_loader.cmake, see
Building hekad with External Plugins.