iRules Style Guide

This article (formatted here in collaboration with and from the notes of F5er Jim_Deucker) features an opinionated way to write iRules, which is an extension to the Tcl language. Tcl has its own st...
code-snapshot.png
Updated May 20, 2024
Version 4.0
devops
iRules
series-irules-getting-started
JRahm's avatar
Icon for Admin rankAdmin
Christ Follower, Husband, Father, Technologist. I love community and I especially love THIS community. My background is networking, but I've dabbled in all the F5 iStuff, I'm a recovering Perl guy, and am very much a python enthusiast. Learning alongside all of you in this accelerating industry toward modern apps and architectures.
View Profile
Jim_Deucker's avatar
Icon for Employee rankEmployee
Author of vscode extensions for iRules, iApps and Tcl, https://github.com/bitwisecook
View Profile
JRahm's avatar
Icon for Admin rankAdmin
Christ Follower, Husband, Father, Technologist. I love community and I especially love THIS community. My background is networking, but I've dabbled in all the F5 iStuff, I'm a recovering Perl guy, and am very much a python enthusiast. Learning alongside all of you in this accelerating industry toward modern apps and architectures.
View Profile
Juergen_Mang's avatar
Juergen_Mang
Icon for MVP rankMVP
Dec 23, 2022

Great article. Most things are cosmetical, but some realy important things are mentioned also. I will highlight:

  • K15650046: Tcl code injection security exposure
  • Always wrap expressions in curly brackets to avoid double expansion
  • iRule priorities
  • the static:: behavior

I see in in the wild often scripts that violates against these best practices.

What also could be mentioned is: switch cases do not need any "return" or "break" statements, too not fall through. I saw "return" many times errorneous used in this context.