The configuration file

The RoboHydra configuration file is a JSON file with the list of plugins to load, the port to listen on, SSL information if you want RoboHydra to use the HTTPS protocol when responding to requests, and information about the RoboHydra summoner.

It doesn’t actually contain any heads, those go in plugins! See the Writing your own plugins section for more information.

Plugins

A basic configuration file with a simple list of plugins looks like this:

{"plugins": ["logger", "replayer"]}

Each element in the plugins list in the configuration file can be one of two things:

• A string with the name of the plugin.
• A Javascript object with the properties name and config. The former specifies the name of the plugin to load, while the latter specifies a Javascript object with configuration keys and values to be passed to the plugin.

For example, a RoboHydra configuration file loading a plugin logger without special configuration and a plugin named my-plugin with the configuration keys path and logLevel could be:

{"plugins": ["logger",
             {"name": "my-plugin",
              "config": {"path": "/var/log/example.log",
                         "logLevel": "warn"}}]}

As several plugins might have common configuration options, one can specify configuration defaults for all of them in the pluginConfigDefaults key. That is, this configuration:

{"plugins": ["logger",
             {"name": "my-plugin",
              "config": {"path": "/var/log/example.log",
                         "logLevel": "warn"}}],
 "pluginConfigDefaults": {"logLevel": "debug"}}

is equivalent to this:

{"plugins": [{"name": "logger",
              "config": {"logLevel": "debug"}},
             {"name": "my-plugin",
              "config": {"path": "/var/log/example.log",
                         "logLevel": "warn"}}]}

Plugin load paths

If you don’t have your plugins in robohydra/plugins or any of the other plugin directories, you can specify a list of extra directories for RoboHydra to search for plugins with the pluginLoadPaths key:

{"plugins": ["logger", "myplugin"],
 "pluginLoadPaths": [".", "functional-tests/robohydra-plugins"]}

Directories later in the array have higher precedence, but plugin load directories specified on the command line have even higher precedence.

Port

You can specify the port RoboHydra should listen on with the key port:

{"plugins": ["myplugin"],
 "port": 3003}

A port specified on the command line (-p option) will have precedence over the port number in the configuration file.

Quiet

If you don’t want RoboHydra to print anything (except errors) on screen, you can use the quiet option:

{"plugins": ["myplugin"],
 "quiet": true}

SSL configuration

If you want RoboHydra to use the HTTPS protocol, ie. to respond to SSL requests, you have to set the secure property to true, and the property sslOptions to an object with the properties key and cert specifying the paths to the files containing the secret key and the server certificate respectively. An example configuration file for an HTTPS server could be:

{"secure": true,
 "sslOptions": {"key":  "my-key.pem",
                "cert": "my-cert.pem"},
 "plugins": ["logger"]}

Summoners

When you use summoners and have more than one plugin that specifies a hydra picker, you need to specify in the configuration file which of the plugins contains the picker to be used (because you can only use one!). You do so by setting the configuration key summoner to an object with the property hydraPickerPlugin set to the name of that plugin. For example:

{"plugins": ["plugin-with-picker", "another-plugin-with-picker", "moar"],
 "summoner": {"hydraPickerPlugin": "plugin-with-picker"}}

Specifying a plugin that doesn’t define any picker will result in an error. On the other hand, if you only load one plugin that defines a picker, there’s no need to specify hydraPickerPlugin in the configuration file.

Full example

This is an example configuration file with every possible option, for reference:

{"plugins": ["logger",
             "simple-summoner",
             {"name": "websockets",
              "config": {"path": "/var/log/example.log",
                         "logLevel": "warn"}}],
 "pluginConfigDefaults": {"logLevel": "debug"},
 "pluginLoadPaths": ["examples/plugins"],

 "port": 3003,
 "quiet": true,

 "secure": true,
 "sslOptions": {"key":  "my-key.pem",
                "cert": "my-cert.pem"},

 "summoner": {"hydraPickerPlugin": "simple-summoner"}}

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