Signed-off-by: IanMadd <maddaus@protonmail.com>
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About Chef InSpec and Train Plugins |
Chef InSpec and Train Plugins
What are Chef InSpec Plugins?
Chef InSpec Plugins are optional software components that extend the capabilities of InSpec. For example, inspec-iggy
is a Plugin project that aims to generate Chef InSpec controls from infrastructure-as-code files. Plugins are distributed as RubyGems, and Chef InSpec manages their installation. Chef InSpec Plugins always begin with the prefix 'inspec-'.
What are Train Plugins?
Train Plugins allow Chef InSpec to speak to new kinds of targets (typically new remote targets or APIs, but you could treat the local system in a new way if you wished to). For example, if you wanted to audit a Kubernetes cluster, you might want a transport that can talk to the supervisor API. You would develop a Train Plugin for that, and install it using the Chef InSpec command line. Train Plugins always begin with the prefix 'train-'.
What can plugins do?
Currently, each plugin can offer one or more of these capabilities:
- define a new command-line-interface (CLI) command suite (
inspec
plugins) - connectivity to new types of hosts or cloud providers (
train
plugins) - DSL extensions at the file, control, describe block, or test level
- DSL extensions for custom resources
Future work might include new capability types, such as:
- reporters (output generators)
- attribute fetchers to allow reading Chef InSpec attributes from new sources (for example, a remote encrypted key-value store)
How do I find out which plugins are available?
The Chef InSpec CLI can tell you which plugins are available:
$ inspec plugin search inspec-
How do I install and manage plugins?
The Chef InSpec command line now offers a new subcommand just for managing plugins.
You can install a plugin by running:
$ inspec plugin install inspec-some-plugin
$ inspec plugin install train-some-plugin
For more details on what the plugin
command can do, see the online help, or run inspec plugin help
.
How do I write a plugin?
Chef InSpec Plugins
For details on how to author an Chef InSpec Plugin, see the developer documentation
Train Plugins
For details on how to author a Train Plugin, see the developer documentation