Grafana data source plugin template

This template is a starting point for building a Data Source Plugin for Grafana.

What are Grafana data source plugins?

Grafana supports a wide range of data sources, including Prometheus, MySQL, and even Datadog. There’s a good chance you can already visualize metrics from the systems you have set up. In some cases, though, you already have an in-house metrics solution that you’d like to add to your Grafana dashboards. Grafana Data Source Plugins enables integrating such solutions with Grafana.

Getting started

Backend

1. Update Grafana plugin SDK for Go dependency to the latest minor version:

   go get -u github.com/grafana/grafana-plugin-sdk-go
   go mod tidy

2. Build backend plugin binaries for Linux, Windows and Darwin:

   mage -v

3. List all available Mage targets for additional commands:

   mage -l

Frontend

1. Install dependencies

   npm install

2. Build plugin in development mode and run in watch mode

   npm run dev

3. Build plugin in production mode

   npm run build

4. Run the tests (using Jest)

   # Runs the tests and watches for changes, requires git init first
   npm run test
   
   # Exits after running all the tests
   npm run test:ci

5. Spin up a Grafana instance and run the plugin inside it (using Docker)

   npm run server

6. Run the E2E tests (using Cypress)

   # Spins up a Grafana instance first that we tests against
   npm run server
   
   # Starts the tests
   npm run e2e

7. Run the linter

   npm run lint
   
   # or
   
   npm run lint:fix

Distributing your plugin

When distributing a Grafana plugin either within the community or privately the plugin must be signed so the Grafana application can verify its authenticity. This can be done with the @grafana/sign-plugin package.

Note: It's not necessary to sign a plugin during development. The docker development environment that is scaffolded with @grafana/create-plugin caters for running the plugin without a signature.

Initial steps

Before signing a plugin please read the Grafana plugin publishing and signing criteria documentation carefully.

@grafana/create-plugin has added the necessary commands and workflows to make signing and distributing a plugin via the grafana plugins catalog as straightforward as possible.

Before signing a plugin for the first time please consult the Grafana plugin signature levels documentation to understand the differences between the types of signature level.

1. Create a Grafana Cloud account.
2. Make sure that the first part of the plugin ID matches the slug of your Grafana Cloud account.
   • You can find the plugin ID in the plugin.json file inside your plugin directory. For example, if your account slug is acmecorp, you need to prefix the plugin ID with acmecorp-.
3. Create a Grafana Cloud API key with the PluginPublisher role.
4. Keep a record of this API key as it will be required for signing a plugin

Signing a plugin

Using Github actions release workflow

If the plugin is using the github actions supplied with @grafana/create-plugin signing a plugin is included out of the box. The release workflow can prepare everything to make submitting your plugin to Grafana as easy as possible. Before being able to sign the plugin however a secret needs adding to the Github repository.

1. Please navigate to "settings > secrets > actions" within your repo to create secrets.
2. Click "New repository secret"
3. Name the secret "GRAFANA_API_KEY"
4. Paste your Grafana Cloud API key in the Secret field
5. Click "Add secret"

Push a version tag

To trigger the workflow we need to push a version tag to github. This can be achieved with the following steps:

1. Run npm version <major|minor|patch>
2. Run git push origin main --follow-tags

Learn more

Below you can find source code for existing app plugins and other related documentation.

• Basic data source plugin example
• plugin.json documentation
• How to sign a plugin?