pyplugins

This is a toy library used to understand how plugins and entry points work in Python.

Installation

To install, clone this package and create a new virtual environment (recommended to use a new terminal to avoid accidentally messing up your current environment!).

$ git clone https://github.com/LiamPattinson/pyplugins
$ cd pyplugins
$ python3 -m venv venv 
$ source venv/bin/activate # Linux
$ venv/bin/Activate.ps1 # Windows

To install:

$ python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
$ python3 -m pip install .

To run the tests:

$ python3 -m pip install .[test]
$ python3 -m pytest tests

Usage

There are three component Python packages:

pyplugins: A library that can be extended with plugins. It provides a class ArtPrinter that generates ASCII 'art'. Other package maintainers can extend this class with new templates.
ornithology: A plugin for pyplugins that comes packaged alongside pyplugins in the src directory.
radical: A plugin for pyplugins that is packaged separately, with its own pyproject.toml file. This is located within the plugins directory.

The ArtPrinter can be used as so:

>>> from pyplugins import ArtPrinter
>>> ArtPrinter.print("default")

As ornithology is packaged alongside pyplugins, the following call will also work:

>>> ArtPrinter.print("bird")

Note that there is no need to explicitly import ornithology, nor is it imported within pyplugins. This is handled entirely via entry points.

The radical library provides 'artwork' with the key "s", but if we try to call the following, we should receive a KeyError:

>>> ArtPrinter.print("s")

To make this work, we need to install the radical library:

$ python3 -m pip install plugins/radical

The above call should now work.

To understand how this code works, see the __init__.py file within pyplugins and the [project.entry-points."pyplugins.templates"] heading in the pyproject.toml files.