Just getting a place for us to discuss the creation of plugins. I’m heading off for the night, but will pop back in here tomorrow with some goodies on next steps 🙂

Thanks Matt! Looking forward to welcoming newcomers and old faces to a world of possibilities 🙂

Hey @sameena syed, I saw your question in general, had a go at answering a few below https://pact-foundation.slack.com/archives/C5F4KFKR8/p1670325812233529 Thanks for joining the channel. You asked say 4 q's 1. Can you automate testing of gRPC with Pact a. Yes. with the Pact-protobuf-plugin. https://github.com/pactflow/pact-protobuf-plugin 2. Can you test Kafka with Pact. a. We have some examples with the existing Pact framework (some are Pactflow branded but work with the OSS broker) i. https://docs.pact.io/recipes/kafka ii. https://docs.pactflow.io/docs/examples/kafka/js/consumer iii. https://docs.pactflow.io/docs/examples/kafka/java/consumer iv. https://docs.pactflow.io/docs/examples/kafka/java/provider b. We do not currently have a Kafka plugin, You can request or vote for one of our Canny feature request board https://pact.canny.io/ 3. gRPC testing is only available through plugins - https://docs.pact.io/plugins 4. Plugins will be supported by any Pact implementation using the underlying Rust framework, that supports V4 Pact specification (and utilses plugins) a. There is some small amount of work to do, to introduce plugin support to pact-net. We can help provide advice to yourself to aid the main maintainer Adam Rodgers. b. If the language doesn't support it, but is capable of supporting FFI calls, a user could build out a Pact framework with support for plugins. I am fairly new to the world of gRPC and haven't used Kafka in production, but always happy to learn new things and help you along

Hi I want to explore on the gRPC plugin with maven example, so i installed the protobuf plugin and now im trying to run consumer test its failing with below reason. Can someone help me what i am missing here

<<< FAILURE! - in io.pact.example.grpc.maven.PactConsumerTest
calculateRectangleArea{MockServer, SynchronousMessages}  Time elapsed: 1.542 s  <<< ERROR!
kotlin.UninitializedPropertyAccessException: lateinit property process has not been initialized
	at io.pact.example.grpc.maven.PactConsumerTest.calculateRectangleArea(PactConsumerTest.java:45)

I created a repo with go plugin template and made the changes following readme, now when I try to install it i'm getting below error

pact-plugin-cli.exe install <https://github.com/sameena-ops/pact-sample-plugin/releases/tag/v0.0.5>
Installing plugin pact-sample-plugin version 0.0.4
✔ Plugin with name 'pact-sample-plugin' and version '0.0.4' already exists. Overwrite it? · Yes
Error: Did not find a matching file pattern on GitHub to install

We are using pact-protobuf-plugin version : v-0.2.3, The protobuf under contract test imports another protobuf, could you please help me out how we can pass multiple protobuf into V4Pact builder

Protodoc is a pretty cool tool for visualising your proto files. Here is an example with our plugin.proto file https://gist.github.com/YOU54F/5a1ac48da75bea30a2cf019d9d1929a1

I noted that in a consumer pact test we need to specify the version of the pact plug-in, at least in pact-js If we do, we use the latest version of the plug-in in the plug-in directory, regardless of the version specified in the test. This means the pact gets encoded with the protobuf plug-in later version than specified. On the provider side, the provider test reads the required plug-in version from the file. I had ran my provider test after deleting the latest plug-in from my plug-in folder, which causes my provider test to fail. It might be nice for 1. Use the specified version always, or inform user that you are using a later on on consumer side 2. Provider side - should it alert if it can’t find the correct version plug-in, should it automatically try and download it, if it doesn’t exist Otherwise how do we easily make it visible to a provider, which plugins they require in order to run a particular set of pact verifications. Could there be an ability to retrieve the plugins used for a specific verification, same could be extended to provider states. I could do something with some api calls, get pacts for verification, pull down contents, filter through for provider states and pact plugin entries and print back to the user

Hi all In relation to pact plugins, we at OutSystems are trying to check if we can write a plugin to do contract testing that use NATS as the delivery system of messages between systems to test. That is the services communicate via message exchange with NATS (https://nats.io/) (that messages are json payload to a specific topic). That made us checking the plugins documentation and examples and some questions were raised: • Can we currently do a plugin that would connect to Nats like a client and subscribe to topic to either receive or publish messages, and verify the content of those messages (like Grpc or protobuf or kafka) • Can we use .Net for creating the plugin? If not, since pact-net is a wrapper for the Rust common engine, do we need to use Rust. Or can we use Kotlin? • Does pact-net already support plugin usage like pact-rust or pact-jvm? And if not, when can we expect that to happen, if at all? • How does contract visualization occur on the pactflow site? • What kind of support can we expect from Pactflow/Smartbear team for this endeavor?

Hello Pact, I am still working on trying to get a WebSockets plugin (rust) up and running and are hitting some issues. We have implemented the start_mock_server and stop_mock_server requests and when invoked manually using gRPC and calling the enpoints the WS server starts up and can be interacted with. Calling the Shutdown RPC then closes all connections and returns the match results (of which there are none). We are now trying to implement the consumer test so that it submits the interactions to the server. This is where we are struggling a bit: 1. The pact is being sent to the plugin successfully. The interaction we are setting up is present and looks correct. However when we decode the JSON to a v4 Pact the transport value is always None - does this matter? 2. When running the consumer test the start mock server request is sent and the server is stood up. However the plugin immediately starts shutting down, we get no configure_interaction request and there is a panic on main where the shutdown request was sent but the plugin has already gone away. 3. When we pact_builder.synchronous_messages() in the consumer test the vector is always empty, we therefore cannot loop to perform the tests. Switching to sending the message manually doesn’t fix the problem highlighted in 2. We are trying to follow the pact-plugin-protobuf from the pactflow repo and everything looks the setup the same. But obviously we are missing something here. Is it possible to get some pointers with this? Thanks,

Hi, Can I reify protobuf message (async message) like a normal message? I expect to able to get message object without any matching and pass it to a callback/handler.

I got this error when working with protobuf plugin:

pact_ffi::plugins: Failed to call out to plugin - Request to configure interaction failed: Failed to process protobuf: Failed to invoke protoc binary: exit code exit status: 1

According to this https://github.com/pactflow/pact-protobuf-plugin#logging, how can I set env

LOG_LEVEL

exactly? I checked

/path/to/plugins/protobuf/log/*.log.Y-M-D

, all files are empty, and I can't see the real problem. I tried this but it doesn't work:

LOG_LEVEL=debug PACT_LOGLEVEL=trace phpunit example/async-message/consumer/tests/Contract/

Is it a good idea to support loading plugins from multiple directories? e.g. Support multiple values for

PACT_PLUGIN_DIR

, or introduce new var

PACT_PLUGIN_DIRS

About csv plugin https://docs.pact.io/implementation_guides/pact_plugins/plugins/csv#csv-matching-definitions: If we use headers, mock server will response with columns that are sorted by column's name in ascending order. For example:

$response
            ->setStatus(200)
            ->setBody([
                'csvHeaders' => true,
                'column:id' => "matching(regex, '^[0-9a-f]{8}(-[0-9a-f]{4}){3}-[0-9a-f]{12}$','{$id}')",
                'column:name' => "matching(type,'{$name}')",
                'column:gender' => "matching(regex, 'male|female|other','{$gender}')",
            ])
            ->setContentType('text/csv')
        ;

Mock server will return:

gender,id,name
$gender,$id,$name

Is this expected behavior?

Currently when provider verifier can't find the required plugin, it simply shutdown without any error message:

PACT_LOGLEVEL=debug phpunit example/provider/                                                                                                                                                          12:41:36
Xdebug: [Step Debug] Could not connect to debugging client. Tried: 127.0.0.1:9003 (through xdebug.client_host/xdebug.client_port).
PHPUnit 9.5.20 #StandWithUkraine

2023-04-03T05:41:46.951993Z DEBUG ThreadId(01) pact_ffi::verifier: pact_ffi::verifier::pactffi_verifier_add_directory_source FFI function invoked
2023-04-03T05:41:46.952030Z DEBUG ThreadId(01) pact_ffi::verifier: pact_ffi::verifier::pactffi_verifier_execute FFI function invoked
2023-04-03T05:41:46.952033Z DEBUG ThreadId(01) pact_ffi::verifier::handle: Pact source to verify = Dir(/home/myname/Projects/pact-php-csv/example/provider/tests/Contract/../../../broker/pacts)
2023-04-03T05:41:46.952639Z DEBUG ThreadId(01) pact_plugin_driver::catalogue_manager: Updated catalogue entries:
core/content-generator/binary
core/content-generator/json
core/content-matcher/json
core/content-matcher/multipart-form-data
core/content-matcher/text
core/content-matcher/xml
2023-04-03T05:41:46.952667Z DEBUG ThreadId(01) pact_plugin_driver::catalogue_manager: Updated catalogue entries:
core/matcher/v1-equality
core/matcher/v2-max-type
core/matcher/v2-min-type
core/matcher/v2-minmax-type
core/matcher/v2-regex
core/matcher/v2-type
core/matcher/v3-content-type
core/matcher/v3-date
core/matcher/v3-datetime
core/matcher/v3-decimal-type
core/matcher/v3-includes
core/matcher/v3-integer-type
core/matcher/v3-null
core/matcher/v3-number-type
core/matcher/v3-time
core/matcher/v4-array-contains
core/matcher/v4-equals-ignore-order
core/matcher/v4-max-equals-ignore-order
core/matcher/v4-min-equals-ignore-order
core/matcher/v4-minmax-equals-ignore-order
core/matcher/v4-not-empty
core/matcher/v4-semver
2023-04-03T05:41:46.952718Z DEBUG ThreadId(01) pact_verifier: Scanning "/home/myname/Projects/pact-php-csv/example/provider/tests/Contract/../../../broker/pacts"
2023-04-03T05:41:46.952871Z  INFO ThreadId(01) pact_verifier: Pact file requires plugins, will load those now
2023-04-03T05:41:46.952881Z DEBUG ThreadId(01) pact_plugin_driver::plugin_manager: Loading plugin PluginDependency { name: "csv", version: Some("0.0"), dependency_type: Plugin }
2023-04-03T05:41:46.952894Z DEBUG ThreadId(01) pact_plugin_driver::plugin_manager: Did not find plugin, will start it
2023-04-03T05:41:46.952896Z DEBUG ThreadId(01) pact_plugin_driver::plugin_manager: Loading plugin manifest for plugin PluginDependency { name: "csv", version: Some("0.0"), dependency_type: Plugin }
2023-04-03T05:41:46.952902Z DEBUG ThreadId(01) pact_plugin_driver::plugin_manager: Looking for plugin in "/home/myname/.pact/plugins"
2023-04-03T05:41:46.953001Z DEBUG ThreadId(01) pact_ffi::verifier: pact_ffi::verifier::pactffi_verifier_shutdown FFI function invoked
F                                                                   1 / 1 (100%)

Time: 00:00.080, Memory: 28.32 MB

There was 1 failure:

1) App\Provider\Tests\Contract\PactVerifyTest::testPactVerifyConsumer
Failed asserting that false is true.

/home/myname/Projects/pact-php-csv/example/provider/tests/Contract/PactVerifyTest.php:58

FAILURES!
Tests: 1, Assertions: 1, Failures: 1.

I think it should log an error message like:

Can't find plugin csv in /home/myname/.pact/plugins

Do you think so?

Hey 👋 Is anyone here aware of the status of plugins for pact ruby? I don't see it on the roadmap https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-ruby/blob/master/ROADMAP.md and we have a use case for pact that would require us to be able to use plugins from ruby.

Hello again, I have another query about plugins that provide a transport. With the WebSocket plugin that we are creating we need to be able to support

ws

and

wss

connections, mostly to providers at the moment but it may be that we need it for consumers also. Currently our plugin just adds one "transport" to the catalogue:

websockets

. But this means that when verifying contracts there is no way to tell the pact-standalone-verifier to use a

wss

scheme when connecting to the provider server. We noticed that the

ProviderInfo

struct has a

scheme

field which looks like it would be perfect for our use case but the pact-standalone-verifier does not expose this option. Looking at the source code here [1] it looks like it used to, but this is not listed in the docs a the top. We considered having the plugin create two transports

ws

and

wss

but this then meant that the consumer would have to determine which transport to choose so that it is written into the contract. We weren't sure if this was correct as it doesn't really matter for the contract contents if the connection is secure or not. Also we wanted to avoid consumer users from having to create self-signed certs to create contracts unless they really wanted to test with the mock server over wss. Guidance as to the intended approach would be most appreciated 🙂 Side, but related, note: in pact-consumer it looks like

tls

is hard-coded to false [2]. Why is that? Has this not been implemented yet or are secure connections supposed to be solved a different way? [1] https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-reference/blob/master/rust/pact_verifier_cli/src/main.rs#L673 [2] https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-reference/blob/master/rust/pact_consumer/src/mock_server/plugin_mock_server.rs#L64

How can we add plugin config to a contract for a given interaction when that interaction uses a core matcher? We are using JSON-RPC payloads over a WebSocket connection so the content matching is done with the core JSON matcher. However on a given interaction we need to be able to set the following: • Path to connect to the WS server on. e.g.

<ws://localhost:9998/jsonrpc>

- specifically the

/jsonrpc

bit • Headers to send in the connection request • Message payload encoding as text or binary We are using synchronous message contracts to do the verification and we are trying to extend the plugin so that these metadata properties can be set, however we are struggling to find the code path that allows plugin config to be added to the contract files when a core matcher is being used. Advice/guidance on how to achieve this would be greatly appreciated

Hello Team! I have a new question about the Configure Interaction request and numeric data types. When a user creates a contract with a definition such as:

"request": { "id": 1 },

The configure interaction request receives a payload like this:

"request": Value { kind: Some(StructValue(Struct { fields: {"id": Value { kind: Some(NumberValue(1.0)) } } })) }

Now in the contract the the value to match against is

1.0

and not

1

. In the consumer test a message is sent to the mock server with the payload:

{
  "id": 1
}

When the mock server receives this request we try to match against all interactions in the pact but we get a mismatch for this field as:

1.1) [$.id] Expected '0.0' to be equal to '0'

I have been trying to debug and fix this issue and it looks to me like the following is happening: 1. The pact framework is taking the consumer contract and converting it to a protobuf payload to send to the plugin 2. This process converted the id field to a Value:Kind:Number(&f64) 3. In the plugin we decode the protobuf payload using

proto_value_to_json

(I think I took this directly from your protobuf plugin) and for a number Kind it runs:

serde_json::json!(n)

4. serde is seeing the f64 and creating a Value::Number(Number::Float)) 5. So now we have lost the information that the original number was an int and not a float and our comparison fails when we receive an int It seems to me that serde has a good way of handling the different number types but the prost_types definition of

Kind::NumberValue(f64),

is reducing the amount of information that can be conveyed to the plugin about a numeric field during the configure interaction request. I had a search online around protobuf number types and it looked like different types of numbers are supported so I'm not understanding why prost_types treats all numbers as floats. I am not very familiar with protobuf at all though so I probably am just missing something. In the mean time we are encouraging the users to define the contract as

{ "id": "matching(integer, 1)" }

but I think it should be possible for them to just specify the contract as

{ "id": 1 }

and have it work. This did work when we were using the core application/json matcher but I am assuming that is because the type information is not lost when passing the values around in rust.

I'm trying to get some metadata_rules added to the contract via the confiure_interaction request and I can't seem to work out why it doesn't work. I have added them into the metadata_rules field of the request part of the interaction and they are going back to the driver. However when I get the start_mock_server request and parse the pact I cannot see any metadata rules in the contract. In my debugging journey I noticed this: https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-plugins/blob/main/drivers/rust/driver/src/content.rs#L313 The matching rule category is always set to BODY. Could that be related to my issue? Looking at the Category enum it seems that Contents and Metadata are also available and I wonder if those would be more appropriate for message contents and metadata rules.

While I am asking questions actually, I may as well explain my true aim. In the metadata field of the request I want a nested object which will match when there are more keys than are specified in the contract. Currently I get this error from the matching

1) c9d8b50f42b5d1e7 - the following mismatches occurred:
        1.1) [] Expected metadata key 'headers' to have value '{"sec-websocket-protocol":"json-rpc"}' but was '{"connection":"upgrade","host":"[::1]:64257","sec-websocket-key":"qtwa71ue1dhx8b0ffbiqyw==","sec-websocket-protocol":"json-rpc","sec-websocket-version":"13","upgrade":"websocket"}' - Expected '{"sec-websocket-protocol":"json-rpc"}' to be equal to '{"connection":"upgrade","host":"[::1]:64257","sec-websocket-key":"qtwa71ue1dhx8b0ffbiqyw==","sec-websocket-protocol":"json-rpc","sec-websocket-version":"13","upgrade":"websocket"}'

The contract specifies the

"sec-websocket-protocol":"json-rpc"

header, but the request comes in with a lot of others. We only need the one header validated in the contract. The connection request we are establishing has the header and it has the correct value so this should pass. However as the contract doesn't contain all the other headers it fails. I'd like to make the matching work like the header matching in HTTP contracts, however I want the headers in an object called headers and not on the root of the metadata object. This is because we are now trying to add query params as well and I'd like to keep the two separate.

@Adam Cox @Tien Vo @Ali Ustek we are planning to make some improvements to the plugin interface. This will probably just be a minor update to the current interface, if possible. The place to start would be to let us know what the biggest issues you have had using or building the plugins. One area we are definitely looking to improve is the verification sequence, but this will be the opportunity to make other improvements as well.

Hello there. I tried using avro plugin few weeks ago. Looks like it requires java 17. Just wanted to check if there is any plan to make the plugin java 11 compatible?

Also wanted to get your thoughts in terms of any preferred programming languages for these pact plugins in general. In the documentation, there was a suggestion to choose a language (like golang or rust) which can be compiled to create a single executable to multiple languages. Are those type of languages strongly recommended for plugins or they don’t matter too much?

Btw, I am keen to contribute especially to avro stuff as we have use cases within our org. I tried the plugin creation workshop to get a feel of what is involved in building a plugin. I found this template quite useful. As a follow on to the workshop, I played with it little bit making use of ANTLR to auto generate parsers for this grammar. Then added bit of logic on top of that to create interaction with matching rules for message payload using avro. This is all to get a feel of what is involved and didn’t want to go any further than that. This all looks interesting and I am keen to contribute either to the existing avro plugin or continue creating a version of it using golang if that is the preferred language.

Is there an estimate of when Pact JS would support plugins? (even a sketchy branch would suffice)

blobwave Hey Pact Plugin friends! I’ve been promising a community meet for a while and it’s slow trying to get everything organised. In the interim would people be up for a Plugin show and tell session? It can be pretty informal just in a Slack huddle, or we can do something recorded. cc: @Praveen Erode Mohanasundaram / @Ali Ustek / @Adam Cox

Hi all! Is there a way to modify the consumer's request in the provider test when using the gRPC plugin with Golang? I'm assuming RequestFilter/BeforeEach/AfterEach are out of the picture, and it doesn't seem like there's an equivalent to the way of doing it with JVM here. For context, I'm hoping to be able to add an auth header during the provider test so that we don't have to worry about it expiring after being generated/set during the consumer test. I've been able to set it using the requestMetadata field in the consumer test, so I may plan to just write a method that will modify the contract to overwrite the token during the test, but I wanted to make sure there wasn't a better way to do it first. Thanks!