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Quickstart

This quickstart will help you learn how to create an app plugin using SE2. Along the way it'll also introduce some of SE2's key features:

  • Managing development environments
  • Managing user access
  • Using the plugin editor

Preliminary steps​

Let's go! 🚀

Create an organization​

This is a new account, so we'll need to create our first organization: a (potentially shared) account in which one or more users manage(es) their Suborbital subscription . For this demo, we'll give our organization:

  • The name DemoCompany (note: organization names can contain only letters, numbers, and underscores)
  • The description Always ready to demo

Organization creation screen with fields for name and description

Create an environment​

We can set up multiple separate environments for each of our organizations. These could be used for separating development/staging/production environments or to create different applications for distinct use cases.

Let's set up our first environment for development! We'll give it:

  • The name demo.dev
  • The description development environment

Environment creation screen with fields for name and description

Once we've created our environment, we'll be shown our environment's dashboard. The dashboard contains information about various usage metrics related to the Extension Engine.

Here we can see a counter for plugin builds and build minutes. Both of these are currently 0 because we still need to set up our first integration.

Environment dashboard screen showing zero function builds and zero build minutes

Create an access key​

Next, we'll need to create an access key. We'll click on:

  • Manage access keys
  • Create new access key

Our integration will use this access key to provision resources and execute plugins in SE2. We'll give our access key:

  • The name DemoKey
  • The description: demo access key

Access key creation screen with fields for name and description

tip

We'll only be shown this access key once, so we'll need to store it somewhere safe and secure!

Integrate SE2 with our app​

We'll need to supply our environment variables (our environment access key and the name of our environment) to SE2. Within the directory that contains our app, we'll:

  • Create a file named .env

  • Within our new .env file, we'll add our environment variables:

    • SUBORBITAL_TOKEN is our environment's access key
    • SUBORBITAL_ENV is the name we gave our environment

  • Next we'll need to export those variables by running:

set -a
  • And then:
source .env

Create a tenant (user)​

Suborbital lets an application's users create their own secure, sandboxed plugins, carefully isolated from the core of the system and one another. For this reason, we will create a new tenant, which is a user account with its own plugins inside Suborbital. Our application will then connect the tenant with one of its own internally-maintained users.

✨ Tenant API things ✨

Meet the editor​

The SE2 plugin editor uses SE2's APIs from either Go or JavaScript/TypeScript to provide a low-friction environment for your users to write, build, test, and deploy plugins to your SE2 an instance in a single place. Alternatively, the Builder API can be used programmatically, if that better suits your use case.

Obtain an editor token​

In addition to the IDENTIFIER and ENV_TOKEN, you’ll also need to set NAMESPACE and fn to the name of our namespace (e.g. default) and the name of our plugin (e.g. hello). Copy the token field in the response; this is your editor token.

curl --location --request GET "http://local.suborbital.network:8082/auth/v2/access/${IDENTIFIER}/${NAMESPACE}/${EXT}" \
--header "Authorization: Bearer ${ENV_TOKEN}"

Editor URLs in production​

To edit a plugin via the editor in a production environment, you—or more likely your application—must build a valid URL to pass to the editor.

Configure the URL like so:

  • Domain: https://editor.suborbital.network/
  • Query parameters:
    • builder: https://your-builder.example.com
    • token: The env token you created above
    • ident: The name of your environment followed by a period, followed by the name of your tenant. In our case, it will be dev.suborbital.user1
    • namespace: the name of your namespace if different than “default”
    • fn: the name of your plugin
    • template: the name of the language you wish to use (Go or JavaScript)

Altogether, it should look something like https://editor.suborbital.network/?builder=https://your-builder.example.com&ident=dev.suborbital.user1&fn=hello&template=javascript

Your first plugin​

Paste the URL you created above into your browser to load the plugin editor. Once inside the editor, you can edit, build, test, and deploy your plugins all in one place! By default, the editor will load pre-populated with the greeting plugin below. You can use it to run the editor for the first time.

import { log } from "@suborbital/runnable";

export const run = (input) => {
    let message = "Hello, " + input;

    log.info(message);
    return message;
};
  • The plugin provided is complete, so we can just click "Build"
  • In the "TEST" field, add some text. Here, we've added "new Suborbital user"
  • Click "Run test"
  • Toward the bottom of the editor, click "TEST RESULTS". There's our greeting!

Editor displaying the greeting plugin above with the test output 'Hello, new Suborbital user!'

Executing plugins​

Once your first plugin has been built and deployed, it can be run with a request to the Execution API.

export ENV_TOKEN=<your previously generated token>

curl http://local.suborbital.network:8080/com.suborbital.acmeco/default/hello/v1.0.0 \
     --header "Authorization: Bearer $ENV_TOKEN" \
     -d 'my friend'

hello, my friend

Connect your application​

Now that you've set up SE2 and created your first plugin, you can use SE2's APIs from either Go or JavaScript/TypeScript to start integrating plugins into your application! Suborbital allows users to write custom plugins in their preferred language by clicking the "Language select" button, but unfortunately PHP is not on the list of supported languages—yet!—so Ada chooses JavaScript, another language she's quite comfortable with.

What else can I do?​

Now that you've know how to get SE2 extensibility powers into your app, you might want to:

Questions?​

If you have any questions you can't find answers to in these docs, please email us at team@suborbital.dev!