MCO RPC Agent

Agents can be written that are compatible with the Ruby MCollective RPC API - covered separately in this section - here I’ll show a very basic echo agent and how to plug it into Choria Server at compile time.

Echo Agent

Below a very basic agent that would respond to mco rpc echo ping message="hello world".

package echo

type EchoRequest struct {
    Message string `json:"message" validate:"shellsafe"`
}

type EchoReply struct {
    Message string `json:"message"`
    TimeStamp int `json:"timestamp"`
}

var metadata = &agents.Metadata{
	Name:        "echo",
	Description: "Choria Echo Agent",
	Author:      "R.I.Pienaar <rip@devco.net>",
	Version:     "1.0.0",
	License:     "Apache-2",
	Timeout:     2,
	URL:         "http://choria.io",
}

func New(mgr server.AgentManager) (*mcorpc.Agent, error) {
	agent := mcorpc.New("echo", metadata, mgr.Choria(), mgr.Logger())

	agent.MustRegisterAction("ping", pingAction)

	return agent, err
})

func pingAction(ctx context.Context, req *mcorpc.Request, reply *mcorpc.Reply, agent *mcorpc.Agent, conn choria.ConnectorInfo) {
	i := &EchoRequest{}
	if !mcorpc.ParseRequestData(i, req, reply) {
		return
	}

	reply.Data = &EchoReply{i.Message}
}

// ChoriaPlugin produces the Choria pluggable plugin it uses the metadata
// to dynamically answer questions of name and version
func ChoriaPlugin() plugin.Pluggable {
	return mcorpc.NewChoriaAgentPlugin(metadata, New)
}

You’ll have to write a DDL file like for Ruby agents, review the MCO RPC section in the docs about that, here we’re mainly covering compiling this into the server.

Notice we show the ChoriaPlugin() function here that you saw in the Plugin Interface documentation, this is all you need to do as the framework will use the agent Metadata to supply values like Version, Name etc.

Compile into Choria

You can now build your own Choria instance based on the Packaging documentation, you’ll load your plugin as follows in the packager/user_plugins.yaml

---
echo_agent: gitlab.example.net/ops/echo_agent

Once built you’ll be able to interact with the echo agent via any MCO RPC client - as long as you also write the DDL files.