Create Plugin Architecture With Python - 20/08/2023

Side project

There are some use-cases where a plugin architecture is needed, I call this “code” plugins but it is quite possible that there is already a word for that. The idea is to ‘load’ functions or classes that are dynamically created so that you can have the reference to the instances at runtime. I’ve created 2 solutions for that matter one that is using the __subclasses__ dunder method and one using a decorator.

Solution 1

Repository: https://github.com/syrull/plugin-arch-python/tree/main/Solution-1

SOLUTION-1
│   configuration.py
│   main.py
│   README.md
│   setup.py

└───actions
        action_example1.py
        action_example2.py
        __init__.py

Loading the __subclasses__ of the BaseAction class and creating a ‘pluggable’ classes. The actions can be specified in the configuration.py file in the ACTIONS const. This method is inspired by django’s INSTALLED_APPS method.

The call method is a placeholder for the “actions”.

To Register an action

After that the function will be available at the register in the main.py file.

$ python main.py
[<class 'actions.action_example1.Example1Action'>, <class 'actions.action_example2.Example2Action'>]

Benchmarks

Measure-Command { python .\main.py }

Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 0
Seconds           : 0
Milliseconds      : 24
Ticks             : 240745
TotalDays         : 2.78640046296296E-07
TotalHours        : 6.68736111111111E-06
TotalMinutes      : 0.000401241666666667
TotalSeconds      : 0.0240745
TotalMilliseconds : 24.0745

Solution 2

Repository: https://github.com/syrull/plugin-arch-python/tree/main/Solution-2

SOLUTION-2
│   main.py
│   README.md
│   register.py

└───actions
        action_example1.py
        action_example2.py
        __init__.py

The benefits of this solution are that we have a control over the decorator and we can pass some custom *args, **kwargs to the decorated functions.

To Register an action

After that the function will be available at the register in the main.py file.

$ python main.py
[<function action_example1 at 0x000001CC3F88D310>, <function action_example2 at 0x000001CC3F88D3A0>]

Benchmarks

Measure-Command { python .\main.py }

Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 0
Seconds           : 0
Milliseconds      : 22
Ticks             : 227803
TotalDays         : 2.6366087962963E-07
TotalHours        : 6.32786111111111E-06
TotalMinutes      : 0.000379671666666667
TotalSeconds      : 0.0227803
TotalMilliseconds : 22.7803