# Plugins

***prestd*** is an extensible software via plugins (**OpenCore model**), we use standard operating system library for new functionality.

[Here](https://github.com/prest/prest/discussions/466#discussion-30623) is a discussion of how we arrived at this architecture.

It is possible to create custom **endpoints and middleware** by writing an operating system library (`.so`) and ***prestd*** can load it when starting the server (api).

> We use the [plugin system of the Go language](https://pkg.go.dev/plugin) to load the lib, unfortunately it doesn't work well with *Microsoft Windows* yet - if you are working with ***prestd*** on Windows the plugin endpoint will not exist.

When starting the ***prestd*** server and there is a plugin in the `./lib` folder they are automatically compiled and loaded when accessing their respective endpoint for the first time.

**Change where the libraries will be:** `PREST_PLUGINPATH` is the name of the *environment variable* that has this purpose, by default it comes with the value `./lib`.

or via `toml`:

```
pluginpath = ./lib
```

### Extension-supported modules

* Endpoint
* Middleware

### Process of building

In the first version of the ***prestd*** plugin system we are working with **Go code**.

> This doesn't mean that ***prestd*** doesn't read plugins (library `.so`) written in other technologies (e.g. c, cpp, rust, java and ...). The automatic constructor is designed to work with Go code, in the future we will write for other technologies.


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