I started work on this concept many months ago. However I never had enough free time to get this to complete stage. Today finally I prepared the demo will all crucial features embedded. So, first, let me explain the concept. Generally the idea is to have a command that will be easily extensible with new features. The best way to achieve that is by having a kind of plugin architecture, where there is main program – in this case just an interface in fact as it does not provide any useful features on its own. And there are a lot of plugins that somehow registers to main program.
Crucial thing here is to have it done automatically, so all the user has to do is to install the plugin. Another important feature is to provide bash completion for this program, so that plugin developer can focus on interface itself, not the way of integrating it with bash and still get quite good completion. Of course in more complicated cases developer still has to do some development, but let’s ignore that here as this is not so important.
To achieve all the above I created two demo projects. One is called menu and it implements interface for plugins, do all the necessary jobs, so that plugins can live like almost independent applications, only called by menu. The other is demo plugin that uses all this magic to appear as command in menu just after its installation.
So from user perspective there are two main steps:
- Install menu and all plugins he needs with pip
- Enable bash completion as is usually done with argcomplete
Continue reading “Plugin architecture demo for Python projects”
