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Developing for the Plugin System

With plugins you can extend LibreNMS with special functions that are specific to your setup or are not relevant or interesting for all community members.

You are able to intervene in defined places in the behavior of the website, without it coming to problems with future updates.

This documentation will give you a basis for writing a plugin for LibreNMS.

Distribution

There are two ways to create a plugin.

  1. Local plugin: Within LibreNMS under the app/Plugins directory. This is approriate for plugins that are intended to run only on your instance. A local plugin may ONLY use plugin hooks to augment LibreNMS.
  2. Plugin package: A php package that can be distributed via composer/packagist.org. This is approriate for plugins that are intended to be installed by many people. A plugin package can publish multiple routes, views, database migrations and more in addition to using hooks to augment specific parts of LibreNMS.

Plugin package

Create a package according to the Laravel documentation https://laravel.com/docs/packages To tie in to specific parts of LibreNMS such as the Menu, Device Overview or a Port Tab, use Plugin Hooks.

You can see an example plugin here: example plugin repository.

Please come to discord and share any expriences and update this documentation!

Local plugin

Local plugins need to be placed in app/Plugins

Note: Plugins are disabled when the have an error, to show errors instead set plugins.show_errors

The structure of a plugin is follows:

app/Plugins
            /PluginName
                       /DeviceOverview.php
                       /Menu.php
                       /Page.php
                       /PortTab.php
                       /Settings.php
                       /resources/views
                                       /device-overview.blade.php
                                       /menu.blade.php
                                       /page.blade.php
                                       /port-tab.blade.php
                                       /settings.blade.php

The above structure is checked before a plugin can be installed.

All file/folder names are case sensitive and must match the structure.

Only the blade files that are really needed need to be created. A plugin manager will then load a hook that has a basic functionality.

If you want to customize the basic behavior of the hooks, you can create a class in 'app/Plugins/PluginName' and overload the hook methods.

  • device-overview.blade.php :: This is called in the Device Overview page. You receive the $device as a object per default, you can do your work here and display your results in a frame.
<div class="row">
    <div class="col-md-12">
        <div class="panel panel-default panel-condensed">
            <div class="panel-heading">
                <strong>{{ $title }}</strong>
            </div>
            <div class="panel-body">
                <div class="row">
                    <div class="col-sm-12">
                         {{ $device->hostname }}
                 <!-- Do you stuff here -->
                    </div>
        </div>
        </div>
    </div>
    </div>
</div>

  • port-tab.blade.php :: This is called in the Port page, in the "Plugins" menu_option that will appear when your plugin gets enabled. In this blade, you can do your work and display your results in a frame.

  • menu.blade.php :: For a menu entry

  • page.blade.pho :: Here is a good place to add a own LibreNMS page without dependence with a device. A good place to create your own lists with special requirements and behavior.

  • settings.blade.php :: If you need your own settings and variables, you can have a look in the ExamplePlugin.

PHP Hooks customization

PHP code should run inside your hooks method and not your blade view. The built in hooks support authorize and data methods.

These methods are called with Dependency Injection Hooks with relevant database models will include them in these calls. Additionally, the settings argument may be included to inject the plugin settings into the method.

Data

You can overrid the data method to supply data to your view. You should also do any processing here. You can do things like access the database or configuration settings and more.

In the data method we are injecting settings here to count how many we have for display in the menu entry blade view. Note that you must specify a default value (= [] here) for any arguments that don't exist on the parent method.

class Menu extends MenuEntryHook
{
    public function data(array $settings = []): array
    {
        return [
            'count' => count($settings),
        ];
    }
}

Authorize

By default hooks are always shown, but you may control when the user is authorized to view the hook content.

As an example, you could imagine that the device-overview.blade.php should only be displayed when the device is in maintanence mode and the current user has the admin role. 

class DeviceOverview extends DeviceOverviewHook
{
    public function authorize(User $user, Device $device): bool
    {
        return $user->can('admin') && $device->isUnderMaintenance();
    }
}