Argus Plugins

ArgusCLI provides an interface for your plugins, abstracting away tedious tasks such as parameter validation and command line argument parsers from the developer.

By default, Argus Toolbelt provides the Argus Plugins package as a default set of plugins, but creating your own plugins is easy, and we hope this will encourage developers to contribute with their own plugin to interface with the Argus API.

Creating a new plugin

The register_command decorator will register a command against a plugin with a given name. Both the plugin and the name of the command can be changed via it’s parameters. These parameters are extending and alias.

Function metadata

Argus CLI will by default introspect functions when they’ve been registered with the framework using the @register_command() decorator, which means that the function signature will be used to create the command-line arguments, and the function docstring will be used to provide command line documentation.

Since Python 3.5, Python supports function annotations, and Argus CLI uses these to infer the argument types from the function signature, and create the right type of command-line arguments for your plugin.

Commandline help-text, and parameter descriptions, is extracted from the function docstring, expected to follow the reSTructuredText style used by Sphinx autodoc

Example #1: Registering a command

@register_command()
def your_plugin_command(your_argument: str) -> str:
    """Short description becomes the plugin help text

    Longer description follows after a newline

    :param your_argument: This parameter description becomes the commandline argument help text
    """
    return your_argument

Example #2: Registering a command with extra functionality

Pre-defined choices (enum fields) can be expressed as a populated list: You can alias a keyword argument to something else using :alias your_argument: something_else

@register_command()
def your_plugin_command(your_argument: list = ["option1", "option2"]):
    """This function has an argument that will be called something else on the command-line

    :param your_argument: This should be called something-else on the command-line
    :alias your_argument: something_else
    """
    pass
Note: Plugins and their arguments are turned from snake_case into kebab-case on the commandline

Guides

Creating a simple plugin

Creating a plugin should be easy: Just create a new python file inside on of your plugin directories, as defined by your .argus_cli.yaml settings file created during installation. By default, this file will be found in your $HOME folder.

Step 1: Create the script

We want to call this plugin basic-example; so lets first create the file basic_example.py. Argus CLI will now automatically load this file, and functions inside it that register commands will be available on the commandline.

Step 2: Add a function

Create a simple function that says Hello, Argus. This will be the base for our plugin.

def hello():
    print("Hello, Argus")

Step 3: Register the command to the commandline

Plugin registration is done with the register_command decorator from argus_cli.plugins. This decorator will register your command against your plugin (which is the name of the file, converted to kebab-case).

from argus_cli.plugins import register_command

@register_command()
def hello():
    print("Hello, Argus")

Step 4: Adding help text to the plugin command

Now, let’s add some metadata to our function. This metadata lets ArgusCLI give the user help text, does type checking for arguments and create aliases. The framework is designed to force developers to document their functions, so you’ll need to use docstrings to add metadata.

The format for this is like a normal reST docstring. It contains the help-text and description that will show up when the user runs the application with -h or --help and reST metadata parameters (:<metadata-field>:).

Any of these parts can be omitted, but it is recommended to at least have a help-text.

"""<help text>

<command description>

<metadata>

Let’s update the command to provide some help-text:

from argus_cli.plugins import register_command

@register_command()
def hello():
    """Print 'Hello, Argus'"""
    print("Yo %s, sup?" % name)

Let’s modify our command to say hello to the user instead.

from argus_cli.plugins import register_command

@register_command()
def hello(username):
    """Says hello to the user

    :param str username: Your name
    :alias username: name
    """
    print("Hello, %s" % username)

Now you can run your plugin by writing: argus_cli basics hello --name Bob. Your terminal will now greet you, and you’ll see Hello, Bob!

Creating an API plugin

API plugins are super easy to write. The only thing you need to do to create a plugin that use ArgusAPI, is to import the functions you need from argus_api.api

Lets create a plugin that shows the user how many alarms there are in Argus.

from argus_api.api.alarms.v1.alarm import get_alarms
from argus_cli.plugins import register_command

@register_command(alias="number_of_alarms")
def num_alarms():
    """Displays the number of alarms in argus"""
    alarms = get_alarms()
    print("There are %d alarms" % alarms["count"])

You’ll notice that this command introduces the alias parameter to register_command. This parameter is handy for when you want to call your command something else than your function. Now you can write argus_cli basics number-of-alarms to use the command.

The Argus api documentation is a valuable resource when writing commands that use the API, so make sure to have it handy. You can also inspect the API functions source code to see more information on their parameters and how to use them

Logging from a plugin

Any developer knows that trouble shooting is easier with a log that shows what the program is doing. Because of this ArgusCLI has it’s own logger with a plugin log level.

This log level is below DEBUG, so make sure that your settings file is properly configured!

This logger can be imported from argus_cli.utils.

from argus_cli.plugins import register_command
from argus_cli.helpers.log import log

@register_command()
def i_do_things():
    """Does things"""
    log.plugin("I am entering the plugin!")
    print("Goodbye cruel world")
    log.plugin("And now I'm leaving")

Your commandline will now show the logging and the print (or not, if you’ve set it to log it to a file).

[11:16:09.342][PLUGIN][basics.py:7]: I am entering the plugin!
Goodbye cruel world
[11:16:09.343][PLUGIN][basics.py:9]: And now I'm leaving

Submodules

argus_plugins.generate module

GENERATOR PLUGIN

Generator is used to generate files based on templates — first and foremost, static API files. Generator creates the plugin hooks and redirects to the appropriate generator methods, and can be run with:

argus-cli generate endpoint –name ENDPOINT_NAME -O api/folder/path argus-cli generate endpoint –matching REGEX -O api/folder/path argus-cli generate all

TODO: - Accept custom swagger.json URL - Parse OAuth 3.0 - Resolve recursive references in JSONSchema - Support different authentication modes from command line and generate authentication differently - Templates for other languages - Update API url from settings

argus_plugins.generate.all_endpoints(directory: str) → list[source]

Generates all endpoints to a given directory

Return type:list
Parameters:directory (str) – Output directory

Module contents