Plugin Development Guide

This chapter is a guide for creating syslog-ng OSE plugins.

Prerequisites

C and OOP

You should be able to program in C and be familiar with object-oriented programming.

syslog-ng

You should understand how syslog-ng OSE works, from a user perspective. Recommended reading: syslog-ng OSE Administration Guide

Bison

You should understand the basics of GNU Bison: how Bison is used to parse text, and the syntax of Bison grammar files. Recommended reading: Bison Manual

GLib

You do not need to know anything about GLib except that syslog-ng OSE uses it, and so you should be prepared to look up its documentation when needed. A link to the manual follows, but it is probably easier to use a search engine when looking for specific docs (e.g. by searching “Glib GString”). Recommended reading: GLib Reference Manual

Criterion

syslog-ng OSE uses the Criterion unit testing framework, so you should know how to work with it. Recommended reading: Criterion Docs

Automake/CMake

syslog-ng OSE supports Automake and CMake for compilation. Writing the compilation files (Makefile.am and CMakeLists.txt) is not covered in this guide.

How this Guide Works

The first section contains information about creating modules and plugins, in general.

The following sections are guides for creating specific types of plugins. Each guide goes through the files of an example plugin, explaining things along the way. An explanation will either be an in-code comment, for small but useful information, or an out-of-code paragraph, for central or complex information.

Explanations apply downward; that is, they talk about the code below them.