<p>Plugin developers often want to supply data files (web templates, images, etc) with their package, let's see how to do this using setuptools resource management system.</p> <p>If there are still some lazy people reading this, get an updated version of the <a class="reference" href="http://base-art.net/static/sample_plugin_system-0.1.tgz">code</a>. So, on your plugin's setup.py, add a <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">package_data</span></tt> argument to setup():</p> <pre class="literal-block"> setup( # ... package_data = { 'foo_plugin': ['data/*.tmpl'], }, # ... ) </pre> <p>Create a <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">data</span></tt> directory in foo's plugin directory, and create some files:</p> <pre class="literal-block"> $ mkdir plugins/foo/data $ echo &quot;Hello this is foo\n&quot; &gt; plugins/foo/data/foobar.tmpl </pre> <p>Don't forget to re-run <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">python</span> <span class="pre">setup.py</span> <span class="pre">develop</span></tt> in the foo plugin directory. The next step is to fetch those data files via our plugin_loader:</p> <pre class="literal-block"> for entrypoint in pkg_resources.iter_entry_points(&quot;my.plugins&quot;): plugin_class = entrypoint.load() print 'Plugin %s: %s' % (repr(entrypoint.name), repr(plugin_class)) requirement = pkg_resources.Requirement.parse(plugin_class.__name__) tmpl = 'data/foobar.tmpl' data_contents = pkg_resources.resource_listdir(requirement, 'data') print 'data contents : %s' % repr(data_contents) # let's find and read a data file in our plugin if pkg_resources.resource_exists(requirement, tmpl): foo_bar = pkg_resources.resource_string(requirement, tmpl) # contents of foobar.tmpl as a string print 'tmpl contents : %s' % repr(foo_bar) else: print '%s not found :-(' % repr(tmpl) </pre> <p>Given the plugin's name, we tell pkg_resources to find the plugin's resources given their relative location from the plugin point of view. That's fun, no ? You don't need to care about a global variable storing the full path of the data files, or whatever crappy monkey-code !</p> <p>I promise, next time i'll start playing with plugin API management, probably with interfaces :-)</p> http://base-art.net/Articles/65/ 2006-02-03T09:52:35.000004+01:00 http://base-art.net/Comments/184/ Phil <p>Thanks for the tip Phillip ! The code looks better using this ;) I'll continue to play with setuptools, it's really helpful and a great step for Python packages distribution :)</p> 2006-02-02T23:15:59.000003+01:00 http://base-art.net/Comments/183/ Phillip J. Eby <p>Quick tip: if you use <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">entrypoint.module_name</span></tt> as the first argument to the various <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">resource_foo()</span></tt> APIs, your code won't be dependent on the plugin class' name being the same as the plugin egg's project name, and you won't have to mess around with <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">Requirement.parse()</span></tt> for the use cases shown. Instead, it will always look for resources relative to the package containing the plugin:</p> <pre class="literal-block"> for entrypoint in pkg_resources.iter_entry_points(&quot;my.plugins&quot;): plugin_class = entrypoint.load() print 'Plugin %s: %s' % (repr(entrypoint.name), repr(plugin_class)) tmpl = 'data/foobar.tmpl' data_contents = pkg_resources.resource_listdir(entrypoint.module_name, 'data') print 'data contents : %s' % repr(data_contents) # let's find and read a data file in our plugin if pkg_resources.resource_exists(entrypoint.module_name, tmpl): foo_bar = pkg_resources.resource_string(entrypoint.module_name, tmpl) # contents of foobar.tmpl as a string print 'tmpl contents : %s' % repr(foo_bar) else: print '%s not found :-(' % repr(tmpl) </pre> <p>Also, instead of bundling data with packages, you can bundle it in the egg-info directories and get access to it with <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">entrypoint.dist.get_metadata()</span></tt> and the like. But that might be out of scope for this tutorial.</p> <p>Nice series, by the way, keep up the good work!</p>