# Plugin Developers Guide

This guide describes how to develop custom plugins for use by Barbican. While Barbican provides useful plugin implementations, some OpenStack operators may require customized implementations, perhaps to interact with an existing corporate database or service. This approach also gives flexibility to operators of OpenStack clouds by allowing them to choose the right implementation for their cloud.

## Plugin Status

A Barbican plugin may be considered `stable`, `experimental` or `out-of-tree`.

- A stable status indicates that the plugin is fully supported by the OpenStack Barbican Team

- An experimental status indicates that we intend to support the plugin, but it may be missing features or may not be fully tested at the gate. Plugins in this status may occasionally break.

- An out-of-tree status indicates that no formal support will be provided, and the plugin may be removed in a future release.

### Graduation Process

By default, new plugins proposed to be in-tree will be in the experimental status. To be considered stable a plugin must meet the following requirements:

- 100% unit test coverage, including branch coverage.

- Gate job that executes the functional test suite against an instance of Barbican configured to use the plugin. The gate may be a devstack gate, or a third-party gate.

- Implement new features within one cycle after the new blueprint feature is approved.

### Demotion Process

Plugins should not stay in the experimental status for a long time. Plugins that stay in experimental for more than two releases are expected to move into stable, as described by the Graduation Process, or move into out-of-tree.

Plugins in the stable status may be deprecated by the team, and moved to out-of-tree.

Plugins that stay in the out-of-tree status for more than two releases may be removed from the tree.

## Architecture

Barbican’s plugin architecture enables developers to create their own implementations of features such as secret storage and generation and event handling. The plugin pattern used defines an abstract class, whose methods are invoked by Barbican logic (referred to as Barbican ‘core’ in this guide) in a particular sequence. Typically plugins do not interact with Barbican’s data model directly, so Barbican core also handles persisting any required information on the plugin’s behalf.

In general, Barbican core will invoke a variation of the plugin’s `supports()` method to determine if a requested action can be implemented by the plugin. Once a supporting plugin is selected, Barbican core will invoke one or more methods on the plugin to complete the action.

The links below provide further guidance on the various plugin types used by Barbican, as well as configuration and deployment options.

- Secret Store Plugin Development
- Cryptographic Plugin Development

this page last updated: 2026-08-18 22:10:53

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