Developing cf CLI plug-ins

You can create and install Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface (cf CLI) plug-ins to provide custom commands. You can submit and share these plug-ins to the CF Community repository.

Prerequisite

To use plug-ins, you must use cf CLI v7 or later. For information about downloading, installing, and uninstalling cf CLI commands, see Installing the Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface.

Creating a plug-in

To prepare to create a plugin:

Implement the predefined plug-in interface from plugin.go in the Cloud Foundry CLI repository on GitHub.
Clone the Cloud Foundry CLI repository from GitHub. To create a plugin, you need the basic GO plugin.

Initializing the plug-in

To initialize a plugin:

From within the main() method of your plugin, call:
```
plugin.Start(new(MyPluginStruct))
```
The plugin.Start(...) function requires a new reference to the struct that implements the defined interface.

Invoking cf CLI commands

To invoke cf CLI commands,

From within the Run(...) method of your plugin, call:
```
cliConnection.CliCommand([]args)
```

The Run(...) method receives the cliConnection as its first argument. The cliConnection.CliCommand([]args) returns the output printed by the command and an error.

The output is returned as a slice of strings. The error occurs if the call to the cf CLI command fails.

For more information, see Plugin API in the Cloud Foundry CLI repository on GitHub.

Installing a plug-in

To install a plugin:

Run:
```
cf install-plugin PATH-TO-PLUGIN-BINARY
```
Where PATH-TO-PLUGIN-BINARY is the path to your plugin binary.

For more information about developing plugins, see plugin_examples in the Cloud Foundry CLI repository on GitHub.