Header Files

There are four header directories, each containing header files for different purposes. Three of these are available to plugins.

“ts”

The C Plugin API. These call functions directly embedded in traffic_server and therefore have no explicit linkage.

“tscpp/api”

The C++ Plugin API. These call functions in the libtscppapi.so library to directly interact with the running Traffic Server instance.

“tscpp/util”

C++ utilities. These are standalone headers (although they may depend on other headers in the same directory). These provide functionality that is used inside the Traffic Server core logic but has been demonstrated to be useful for plugins as well [1]. The functions are in the library libtscpputil.so, although many of the utilities are header only. This library is linked in to the traffic_server and traffic_manager binaries and so linkage may not be needed for a plugin.

This library is independent of the C++ API and can be used with or without that library.

“tscore”

Traffic Server core header files. These can only be used inside Traffic Server itself because they either depend on internal data structures either directly or operationally. This is linked in to the traffic_server and traffic_manager binaries therefore has no explicit linkage when used in the core.

Historical

This was a major restructuring the source code layout. The primary goal of this was to unify the include paths for the core and plugins for these headers, and to make C++ support code used in the core also available to plugins. Previously plugins in the Traffic Server codebase used these headers because they could reach over and include them, but third party plugins could not because the headers were not installed.

“proxy/api/ts” was moved to “include/ts”, along with a couple headers from “lib/ts”. This consolidates the C plugin API.

The C++ API headers were split from the source and moved to “include/tscpp/api”. The source files were moved to “src/tscpp/api”.

The contents of “lib/ts” were broken up and moved to different locations. The headers were moved to “include/tscore” for core only headers, while headers to be made available to plugins were moved to “include/tscpp/util”. The corresponding source files were moved to “src/tscore” and “src/tscpp/util” respectively. “libtsutil” was split in to “libtscore” for the core code and “libtscpputil” for shared code.

Appendix

Footnotes