clair/Documentation/drivers-and-data-sources.md

Understanding drivers, their data sources, and creating your own

Clair is organized into many different software components all of which are dynamically registered at compile time. All of these components can be found in the ext/ directory.

Driver Types

Driver Type	Functionality	Example
featurefmt	parses features of a particular format out of a layer	apk
featurens	identifies whether a particular namespaces is applicable to a layer	alpine 3.5
imagefmt	determines the location of the root filesystem location for a layer	docker
notification	implements the transport used to notify of vulnerability changes	webhook
versionfmt	parses and compares version strings	rpm
vulnmdsrc	fetches vulnerability metadata and appends them to vulnerabilities being processed	nvd
vulnsrc	fetches vulnerabilities for a set of namespaces	alpine-sec-db

Data Sources for the built-in drivers

Data Source	Data Collected	Format	License
Debian Security Bug Tracker	Debian 6, 7, 8, unstable namespaces	dpkg	Debian
Ubuntu CVE Tracker	Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, 13.04, 14.04, 14.10, 15.04, 15.10, 16.04 namespaces	dpkg	GPLv2
Red Hat Security Data	CentOS 5, 6, 7 namespaces	rpm	CVRF
Oracle Linux Security Data	Oracle Linux 5, 6, 7 namespaces	rpm	CVRF
Alpine SecDB	Alpine 3.3, Alpine 3.4, Alpine 3.5 namespaces	apk	MIT
NIST NVD	Generic Vulnerability Metadata	N/A	Public Domain

Adding new drivers

In order to allow programmers to add additional behavior, Clair follows a pattern that Go programmers may recognize from the standard database/sql library. Each Driver Type defines an interface that must be implemented by drivers.

type DriverInterface interface {
	Action() error
}

func RegisterDriver(name, DriverInterface) { ... }

Create a new Go package containing an implementation of the driver interface. In the source file that implements this custom interface, create an init() function that registers the driver.

func init() {
	drivers.RegisterDriver("mydrivername", myDriverImplementation{})
}

// This line causes the Go compiler to enforce that myDriverImplementation
// implements the the DriverInterface at compile time.
var _ drivers.DriverInterface = myDriverImplementation{}

type myDriverImplementation struct{}

func (d myDriverImplementation) Action() error {
	fmt.Println("Hello, Clair!")
	return nil
}

The final step is to import the new driver in main.go as _ in order ensure that the init() function executes, thus registering your driver.

import (
	...

	_ "github.com/you/yourclairdriver"
)

If you believe what you've created can benefit others outside of your organization, please consider open sourcing it and creating a pull request to get it included by default.