Dify Plugin Daemon

Overview

Dify Plugin Daemon is a service that manages the lifecycle of plugins. It's responsible for 3 types of runtimes:

• Local runtime: runs on the same machine as the Dify server.
• Debug runtime: listens to a port to wait for a debugging plugin to connect.
• Serverless runtime: runs on a serverless platform such as AWS Lambda.

Dify api server will communicate with the daemon to get all the status of plugins like which plugin was installed to which workspace, and receive requests from Dify api server to invoke a plugin like a serverless function.

All requests from Dify api based on HTTP protocol, but depends on the runtime type, the daemon will forward the request to the corresponding runtime in different ways.

• For local runtime, daemon will start plugin as the subprocess and communicate with the plugin via STDIN/STDOUT.
• For debug runtime, daemon wait for a plugin to connect and communicate in full-duplex way, it's TCP based.
• For serverless runtime, plugin will be packaged to a third-party service like AWS Lambda and then be invoked by the daemon via HTTP protocol. You may refer to SRI Docs for more detailed information.

For more detailed introduction about Dify plugin, please refer to our docs https://docs.dify.ai/plugins/introduction.

CLI

A CLI tool is provided for plugin development on local environment.

• Install via brew

Both Linux and MacOS on either arm64 or amd64 architecture are supported.

• Tapping the Homebrew tap for Dify CLI
• Install Dify cli with brew

brew tap langgenius/dify
brew install dify

• Install with the binary file

Download the binary file from the assets' list in the release page.

Development

Run daemon

Firstly copy the .env.example file to .env and set the correct environment variables like DB_HOST etc.

cp .env.example .env

If you were using a non-AWS S3 storage before version 0.1.2, you need to manually set the S3USEAWS environment variable to false in the .env file.

Attention that the PYTHON_INTERPRETER_PATH is the path to the python interpreter, please specify the correct path according to your python installation and make sure the python version is 3.11 or higher, as dify-plugin-sdk requires.

We recommend you to use vscode to debug the daemon, and a launch.json file is provided in the .vscode directory.

Python environment

UV

Daemon uses uv to manage the dependencies of plugins, before you start the daemon, you need to install uv by yourself.

Interpreter

There is a possibility that you have multiple python versions installed on your machine, a variable PYTHON_INTERPRETER_PATH is provided to specify the python interpreter path for you.

Deployment

Currently, the daemon only supports Linux and MacOS, lots of adaptions are needed for Windows, feel free to contribute if you need it.

Docker

NOTE: Since the daemon depends on a shared cwd directory for running plugins, it's not recommended to use network-based volumes or bind mounts from outside the host machine. This could result in poor performance, such as plugins not launching in a timely manner.

uses docker volume to share the directory with the host machine, it's better for performance.

Kubernetes

For now, Daemon community edition does not support smoothly scale out with the number of replicas, If you are interested in this feature, please contact us. we have a more production-ready version for enterprise users.

Documentation

Development Guide

For developers working on this codebase, see our comprehensive development documentation:

• CLAUDE.md - Main development guide with architecture, code style, and setup
• Database Operations - Query builder patterns, models, and transactions
• Cache Operations - Redis caching, pub/sub, and distributed locks
• Stream Operations - Async streaming patterns and SSE handling
• Generic Types - Type-safe patterns used throughout the codebase
• HTTP Requests - HTTP client utilities and request handling

Runtime Documentation

• SRI Docs - Serverless Runtime Interface documentation

Benchmark

Refer to Benchmark

LICENSE

Dify Plugin Daemon is released under the Apache-2.0 license.