This project demonstrates the recommended way to build your own Redpanda Connect component plugins and run them in a custom distribution.

Start by writing your plugins where ever you like, there are examples in this repo for bloblang functions and methods, inputs, processors and outputs to copy from.

Next, author a main file that calls service.Run() and imports your plugins as shown in this example:

package main

import (
	"context"

	"github.com/redpanda-data/benthos/v4/public/service"

	// Import full suite of FOSS connect plugins
	_ "github.com/redpanda-data/connect/public/bundle/free/v4"

	// Add your plugin packages here
	_ "github.com/benthosdev/benthos-plugin-example/bloblang"
	_ "github.com/benthosdev/benthos-plugin-example/cache"
	_ "github.com/benthosdev/benthos-plugin-example/input"
	_ "github.com/benthosdev/benthos-plugin-example/output"
	_ "github.com/benthosdev/benthos-plugin-example/processor"
)

func main() {
	service.RunCLI(context.Background())
}

Finally, build your custom main func:

go build

Alternatively build it as a Docker image with:

docker build . -t connect-plugin-example

There are few examples of unit tests for plugin components in this repo. The notable examples are the gibberish input tests which demonstrates how to test config validation within your component constructors, and the reverse processor tests which tests the processor behaviour and also demonstrates testing a component that uses *service.Logger and *service.Metrics.

The new service you've built will come with all of the usual Redpanda Connect components plus all of your custom plugins, which you can use like any other type. For example, to use the example plugin components gibberish, reverse and blue_stdout, and our new Bloblang function crazy_object and method into_object, our config might look like this:

input:
  gibberish:
    length: 80

pipeline:
  threads: 1
  processors:
  - sleep:
      duration: 1s
  - reverse: {}
  - bloblang: |
      root.gibberish = content()
      root.more_stuff = crazy_object(10).into_object("foo")

output:
  blue_stdout: {}

And you can run it like this:

./connect-plugin-example -c ./yourconfig.yaml

For more examples on how to configure your plugins check out ./config.