= The Plug-in Skeleton = 

The federation distribution includes a functional skeletion that illustrates handling the [FeddPluginCalls interface calls] though it does not manipulate any external testbed.  It does illustrate most of the support for creating plug-ins, including reading configuration files, creating access control databases that map to local permission structures, storing persistent state and allocating local resources.  The skeleton merely assigns an non-negative integer to each request.  The range of integers is set from a configuration file.

This page describes how to set-up and run the skeleton plug-in, as well as what it does.

== Configuration ==

These are the steps to configure the skeleton:

 * Create a configuration directory that's readable by the user that the plugin will run as (probably your uid)
 * make subdirectories in it called {{{certs}}} and {{{userconf}}}.  The {{{certs}}} directory must be writeable.
 * Copy [attachment:skel.conf] into thie configuration directory.
 * Copy [attachment:skel_access] into the configuration directory
 * [FeddConfig#MakingaFedidCertificate Create a certificate representing a fedid] in this directory.
 * Follow the steps below to edit [attachment:skel.conf] for your installation.

If you put the certificate you created above into {{{fedd.pem}}} all you need to do is change the first line to include the full pathname to your configuration directory.  Something like:

{{{
base: /my/config/directory
}}}

If you named the certificate something other than {{{fedd.pem}}}, you need to change the line that starts with {{{cert_file:}}} to point to your file.  This means changing the pathname.  For example if the certificate was called {{{mycert.pem}}} the line would change to:

{{{
cert_file: %(base)s/mycert.pem
}}}

If the certificate you created has a password, that password must be included as the {{{cert_pwd}}} parameter.  For example:

{{{
cert_pwd: mypwd
}}}

In a real installation, including such passwords in the configuration file implies that the configuration file must be secured.

The next section explains the contents of the configuration files in more detail, but you can skip ahead to running the plug-in if you perfer.

== Configuration File Contents ==

The [attachment:skel.conf] file contains three sections, each set off by a section name in braces, e.g., {{{[access]}}}.  We will explain this file section by section.

=== DEFAULT ===

The first section, {{{[DEFAULT]}}} contains parameters that will be expanded in later sections.  The {{{base}}} parameter will be used in other pathnames, to avoid having to hard code each full pathname.  In later sections,the {{{%(base)s}}} construction will expand to the contents of the {{{base}}}} parameter.  This is a standard construction in a configuration file parsed by python's [http://docs.python.org/library/configparser.html ConfigParser] module.  The value inside the {{{%()}}} is the variable to expand, which is followed by a single character for formatting.  More information about these conventions is [http://docs.python.org/library/configparser.html available].

=== access ===

The {{{[access]}}} section contains most of the plug-in configuration information.