Searching for Mixins and Plugins with Porter

Two of Porter’s great strengths lie in composability and extensibility. Mixins represent the building blocks for composing a bundle, offering functionality that can be utilized during the runtime of a bundle, and Plugins represent swappable backend storage solutions, enabling distributed, Day 2 bundle instance management. (Be sure to read Carolyn Van Slyck’s recent post around Plugins and Collaboration.)

The default installation of Porter includes a handful of useful mixins, including:

• exec for running arbitrary shell commands
• helm for managing Helm charts and releases
• kubernetes for managing Kubernetes manifests and cluster operations

However, there are many more available for use with Porter. As the list grows and source code is distributed across many different GitHub orgs/users, we need a way to efficiently search for available mixins. In addition, a mechanism for mixin developers to add their own offerings to this searchable directory is necessary.

We created the Porter Packages repository to hold these directories, one for mixins and one for plugins. Adding an entry to the list is as simple as supplying a handful of details regarding the package in JSON form: the name of the package, a description of what it does, a URL where it can be installed from, etc.

The Porter CLI then references the appropriate list when a user searches, say, for a Terraform mixin:

$ porter mixin search Terraform
Name        Description                           Author           URL                                     URL Type
terraform   A mixin for using the terraform cli   Porter Authors   https://cdn.porter.sh/mixins/atom.xml   Atom Feed

We can then install this mixin via the provided URL, which in this case is of the Atom feed type:

$ porter mixin install terraform --feed-url https://cdn.porter.sh/mixins/atom.xml
installed terraform mixin v0.5.1-beta.1 (597a442)

The Terraform mixin is now available for use in our next Porter bundle. To peruse the full list of mixins, simply issue porter mixin search without any query.

Similarly, porter plugin search offers a way to discover plugins for Porter. Plugins offer storage solutions for bundle instance and credentials using the cloud of your choosing. We’re just getting started and hope that in the near future, parameter storage will also be included.

Thank you to the community for all of the fantastic package contributions thus far! We’re excited to see Porter’s ecosystem grow with each new mixin or plugin added to the list.

😎 Have a mixin or plugin not already included in either list? Please visit the Porter Packages GitHub repository and follow the instructions on how to add new entries to the lists.

🎉 Interested in developing a new mixin? Check out the Mixin Development Guide to get started. We hope to craft a similar guide for plugin development, but in the meantime, check out the code for the azure plugin via the Porter Azure Plugins repo.