Using Plugin Registries#

Plugin registries are a cache used by plugin-based packages to speed up start up times. By default plugin packages should automate the creation of the plugin registry.

Automatic creation of the plugin registry occurs if a requested plugin could not be found in the registry. Pluginify will attempt to build the registry once if this failure occurs. However, if the missing plugin persists after the registry has been automatically created, an error will be raised informing the user how to fix this problem.

If using manual plugin registry creation, please follow the sections below.

Turning Off Automatic Creation of Plugin Registries#

By default, pluginify automates the creation of plugin registries. If manual creation is preferred, all the user has to do execute the following command:

pluginify config set rebuild-registries False

Additionally, if you want to change the default namespace which pluginify will create registry files for, you can execute the following command.

pluginify config set namespace <your_namespace>

You can also change the default location where pluginify writes registry files to by executing the following command.

pluginify config set registry-directory <path_to_directory>

Environment Variables versus Configuration Variables#

Pluginify supports configuration variables and environment variables. If both are set, environment variables will override the values of the configuration variables. All of the configuration variables mentioned in the previous section have an equivalent environment variable.

Adding any of the following to your your ~/.bashrc or equivalent user setting file for your machine will set a pluginify environment variable.

export PLUGINIFY_REBUILD_REGISTRIES='__boolean_value__'  # Replace with 'True' or 'False'
export PLUGINIFY_REGISTRY_DIRECTORY='__path_to_registry_dir__'  # Replace with a path to a certain directory
export PLUGINIFY_NAMESPACE='__namespace_name__'  # Replace with the name of your namespace

When to Create/Update Plugin Registries#

The plugin registries must be created/updated any time one of the following occurs:

A plugin package under your namespace is installed or reinstalled
A new plugin package is installed or reinstalled
A plugin package is uninstalled
An individual plugin is added, edited, or removed

How to Create/Update the Plugin Registries#

pluginify create executable can be called to create or update the plugin registries.

This executable will create a separate registry for each installed GeoIPS plugin package. Each registry will contain a dictionary of all available plugins provided by that package. The registry will be written in the top-level directory of the installed plugin package and will, by default, be written in JSON and named registered_plugins.json.

The executable can be called with the -s yaml option to specify the output format as YAML rather than JSON. This is useful for debugging since YAML is, arguably, easier to read than JSON. The YAML registries should be ignored by your packages, though, because they are significantly slower to load than JSON.

Usage: pluginify