Werk #11401: New Bakery API

Component Agent bakery
Title New Bakery API
Date Oct 19, 2020
Checkmk Edition Checkmk Enterprise (CEE)
Checkmk Version 2.0.0i1
Level Major Change
Class New Feature
Compatibility Incompatible - Manual interaction might be required

It is now possible to extend Checkmk by writing your own bakery plugins. That is, you can now deploy your own agent plugins and have them baked into your agent packages by the agent bakery.

While this was also possible before by placing the right files at the right locations, you can now deploy your plugins with the help of a well-documented, versioned and comprehensive API. A bakery plugin is a Python 3 module that specifies files that should be deployed to the baked agents, scriptlets that should be executed on the target system (RPM scriplets, DEB maintainer scripts, Solaris PKG installation scripts) on package transition, and Windows agent config entries (YAML config) that should be available for the baked windows agents.

You can add your own bakery plugins by placing them at ~/local/lib/check_mk/base/cee/plugins/bakery/. For instructions and details on how to use the new API, please refer to the official Checkmk documentation. With Checkmk 2.0, also the majority of the builtin bakery plugins have been migrated to the new Bakery API, so having a look at them at ~/lib/check_mk/base/cee/plugins/bakery/ can also help to write your own plugins.

If you have deployed your bakery plugins to Checkmk before, using the previous method of placing a plugin file to ~/local/share/check_mk/agents/bakery/, your plugins will continue to work with Checkmk 2.0, if you convert them to Python 3 syntax. However, the Agent Bakery will display a deprecation warning on baking agents (visible at the bake-agents background job details at the GUI, or on the console if baking via command line), and the support for legacy bakery plugins will be removed in an upcoming version of Checkmk, so it's worth it to migrate your plugins to the new API early.

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