Plugins #

Plugins extend the core capabilities of the BlackStork engine. They are packaged integrations that allow your templates to interact with external APIs, create specific types of content and output different file formats.

A single plugin typically provides a combination of the following components:

BlackStork plugins implement data sources, content providers, formatters, and publishers:

Data sources: integrations to query structured data from external security tools, databases, or local files.
Content providers: components that generate text, tables, images, and other document content locally or through external APIs.
Formatters: components that compile the evaluated document into an output format. The built-in plugin provides Markdown and HTML.
Publishers: outgoing integrations that route and save rendered documents to external destinations.

Dependencies #

To use a plugin’s components in your templates, you must declare the plugin as a dependency in your global configuration block (see Global configuration). A plugin identifier consists of a namespace (the author or vendor) and a short name.

For example, the blackstork/elastic plugin provides the Elasticsearch data source.

Specify the required plugins and their version constraints within the blackstork block at the root of your configuration:

blackstork {
  plugin_versions = {
    "blackstork/elastic" = ">= 0.4.0"
    "blackstork/openai"  = "~> 0.3.1"
  }
}

Installation #

Plugin releases are maintained independently from the core BlackStork engine and follow their own versioning lifecycles.

If you are using the BlackStork SaaS platform, plugin dependencies are resolved automatically by the web engine.

If you are executing builds locally or in a CI/CD pipeline, use the CLI to resolve and download your declared dependencies. Running the install command fetches the required plugins from the registry and places them in your local .blackstork/ directory: