cadquery-plugins

cadquery-plugins is a collection of community contributed plugins that extend the functionality of CadQuery. A description of each of the included plugins can be found in the Plugins documentation. This documentation only includes plugins that have been accepted into this repository by the core CadQuery development team. Installation of third-party plugins from other sources is also possible, but extra care must be taken by the user to ensure that the plugins are safe to use. A list of third-party plugins that meet a minimum criteria of quality are included in the Third-Party Plugins documentation.

Installing Plugins

Each plugin should have installation instructions in its readme, but in general it should be possible to install each of the plugins in this repository using the following form.

pip install -e "git+https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery-plugins.git#egg=[the plugin name]&subdirectory=plugins/[the plugin name]"

Using Plugins

Plugins should automatically monkey-path or otherwise make their functions available when an import is done. Using the included sampleplugin as an example, the following code gives the general method, assuming that the plugin has been installed using pip.

import cadquery as cq
import sampleplugin # Includes the new make_cubes function

result = (cq.Workplane().rect(50, 50, forConstruction=True)
                        .vertices()
                        .make_cubes(10))

Contributing

You will need to set up an Anaconda environment to build and test your plugins before submitting them. If you need full instructions on installing CadQuery with Anaconda, please see the CadQuery readme. Otherwise, run the following in a fresh Anaconda environment:

conda install -c conda-forge -c cadquery cadquery=master pytest

There is a sample plugin directory called sampleplugin that you can copy and rename. Be sure that you are choosing a unique name that is not already part of the Workplane class. Plugins can use monkey patching, and if your plugin causes a naming conflict it can override existing behavior and your contribution will not be accepted.

Once you have renamed the sampleplugin directory, you can then add your plugin code to that directory. In general, these are the steps for adding your plugin to this plugins repository.

Fork this repository.
Clone your fork locally.
Make a copy of the sampleplugin directory.
Rename sampleplugin to the name of your plugin.
Rename sampleplugin.py to an appropriate name.
Replace the contents of sampleplugin.py with your code, making sure that if your plugin uses monkey-patching, that it does so at the bottom of the file and patches the appropriate functions into the Workplane class.
Add a test file for your plugin to the tests directory, using tests/test_sampleplugin.py as an example.
Run pytest and ensure that your plugin passes.
Replace the content of the sections in the sample plugin's README.md with your plugin's information.
Alter the variables at the top of setup.py with your plugin's information.
- You can test pip installation locally with pip install /path/to/your/plugin/directory and then by trying to import the plugin module in a Python REPL.
Submit a PR when your plugin is ready.

Considerations

Plugins which create objects should allow for the fact that they may be required to place an object at each of multiple locations. This is why the sample plugin uses eachpoint.
It is well understood that some developers hate monkey-patching. In the case of plugins, the monkey-patching is not used to override existing behavior, but to add new. That should address most concerns about using monkey-patching.
The CadQuery codebase is not PEP8 compliant, and therefore includes camelCase function names. If you want your plugin to be consistent with the CadQuery codebase you can use camelCase. However, if you cannot bring yourself to ignore PEP8 when creating new code, or do not want to see all the linter errors when using camelCase, using PEP8 compliant function names is fine. The sample plugin uses a PEP8 function name.