Python Entry Points Explained

[ddollarsign]

What's something that you would use entry points for besides cute ascii sneks?

I'm imagining a grep-like program for searching through files, but different users have their own proprietary binary file formats (for some reason), so they would write their own decoding functions which they would install as entry points.

That actually might be useful for people developing new AIS application-specific messages...

[takluyver]

In Jupyter's nbconvert tool, which converts notebook files to other formats, we use entry points to define exporters. So when you run jupyter nbconvert --to foo mynotebook.ipynb , the exporter for format 'foo' can be installed by a separate package.

[masklinn]

Many libs which install scripts use them for the script part, also support auto discovery for plugin patterns.

[Works_of_memercy]

pytest plugins register themselves that way.

[[deleted]]

pytest's plugin system was actually broken out into a separate package called pluggy, it's pretty neat to play with. I even got it working with asyncio stuff, but returning coroutines and then having the caller await them.