Plugins

Monkey architecture is defined by a small and flexible core that expose an API interface to extend the server capabilities and behavior through Plugins. When a plugin is enabled on Monkey, it hooks to the internals and may implement a feature that affects networking, events or the HTTP cycle.

The configuration file conf/plugins.load aims to be an interface to enable or disable a Plugin. The file schema is headed by the [PLUGINS] section and each entry represents a component to load, the key is always Load and the value the absolute path to the Plugin, which is a shared library.

Loading a Plugin

As an example, we will take the Cheetah! Shell Plugin which provides a Shell interface to monitor Monkey, the configuration file should looks as follows:

[PLUGINS]
    Load  /home/foo/monkey/plugins/cheetah/monkey-cheetah.so

The absolute path of the Plugin may change depending of how Monkey is being used, but focusing in the example the important item is the Load key and the path of the Plugin.

Unloading a Plugin

A Plugin will not be loaded if it's not declared on the conf/plugins.load configuration file or if the entry is commented. Using the above example we will comment the entry to avoid Monkey load the Cheetah! Shell plugin:

[PLUGINS]
    # Load  /home/foo/monkey/plugins/cheetah/monkey-cheetah.so

Notes

For more details about specifics of each available Plugin in Monkey, please refer to the Plugins Chapter on this document.