PLUGIN.CONFIG(5)

💖 PLUGIN.CONFIG 💖

okay bestie, so this is the manual page for plugin.config, part of the Apache Traffic Server family of docs (section 5, the file formats girlies, iykyk). grab a strawberry drink and let's get into it 🍓

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✨ NAME ✨

plugin.config — the Traffic Server global plugin configuration file. that's it, that's the name, she's simple and she's iconic 💅

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so plugin.config is the file that controls which run-time loadable plugins Traffic Server has access to, and how those plugins are configured. no cap, it's doing both jobs.

plugins you list in this file are called global plugins because they are always loaded and they have a global effect. this is the opposite of the plugins you specify over in remap.config, whose effects are limited to only the specific mapping rules they're applied to. so like, this file = whole-server energy, remap.config = situational queen.

every configuration line is made of a path to an .so file. that path can either be absolute, or relative to the plugin directory (which is usually /usr/local/libexec/trafficserver).

⚠️ listen to me rn: if a plugin fails to load, that is fatal. Traffic Server will abort. like, whole thing, down. 😭

and here's the thing — in general it is not possible to know whether it is safe for the service to run without a particular plugin, because plugins can have arbitrary effects on caching and authorization policies. so yeah. don't be casual about it.

🔥 IMPORTANT: Plugins should only be listed once. also, the order in which the plugins are listed is also the order in which they are chained for request processing. so the order is not a vibe, it's the whole plot.

an option list of whitespace-separated arguments may follow the plugin name. these get passed as an argument vector to the plugin's initialization function, TSPluginInit().

arguments that begin with the $ character designate Traffic Server configuration variables. those arguments get replaced with the value of the corresponding configuration variable before the plugin is loaded.

when you're using configuration variable expansion, keep in mind that most Traffic Server configuration can be changed. so if a plugin requires the current value, it has to go get that using the management API. no shortcuts, bestie. 🫶

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🦋 EXAMPLES 🦋

here's the vibe, copy her exactly:

# Comments start with a '#' and continue to the end of the line
# Blank lines are ignored
#
# test-plugin.so arg1 arg2 arg3
#
plugins/iwx/iwx.so
plugins/abuse/abuse.so etc/trafficserver/abuse.config
plugins/icx/icx.so etc/trafficserver/icx.config $proxy.config.http.connect_attempts_timeout

see how # starts a comment and it runs all the way to the end of the line? and blank lines? ignored, they're just chillin 🧚

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• TSAPI(3ts)
• TSPluginInit(3ts)
• remap.config(5)

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💜 COPYRIGHT 💜

2026, dev@trafficserver.apache.org

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and that's the whole page, bestie, you ate that 🎀 this was Traffic Server 9.2, dated Feb 12, 2026 — go forth and load your plugins responsibly, mwah 💖✨🌈