Phil on Python plugins continued : resources management

Phil — 2006-02-03T08:52:35Z

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 :)

Phillip J. Eby on Python plugins continued : resources management

Phillip J. Eby — 2006-02-02T22:15:59Z

Quick tip: if you use entrypoint.module_name as the first argument to the various resource_foo() 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 Requirement.parse() for the use cases shown. Instead, it will always look for resources relative to the package containing the plugin:

for entrypoint in pkg_resources.iter_entry_points("my.plugins"):
   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)

Also, instead of bundling data with packages, you can bundle it in the egg-info directories and get access to it with entrypoint.dist.get_metadata() and the like. But that might be out of scope for this tutorial.

Nice series, by the way, keep up the good work!

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Phil on Python plugins continued : resources management

Phillip J. Eby on Python plugins continued : resources management