Publishing Plugins#

Once you’ve finished testing your plugin works as expected, you’re ready to publish it to be installed by other users that are not developers. This is done by uploading your package to Python Package Index (PyPI) with some guidelines around it.

Those guidelines up front:

  • Your plugin’s name as defined in your setup files should start with plover- to avoid clashing with general Python package namespaces

  • Your plugin’s setup files must define one of its keywords to be plover_plugin as this is how the plugin manager finds it on PyPI

  • Your plugin’s setup files must define a long_description. The plugin manager can display plain text, .rst, or .md files specified here.

  • Your plugin should only use features that the distributed version of Plover supports in order to prevent errors for end users; that version can be verified by looking at Plover’s setup files.

The first thing you need to do to actually publish is make an account on PyPI which should be relatively straightforward.

There are a myriad of ways to actually build and publish a package but the easiest and most recommended way to publish to PyPI is by running twine in your plugin directory like so:

python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel
twine upload dist/*

See its documentation for more information on how to install it and set it up. You don’t need to publish to Test PyPI as it suggests unless you want to as part of your workflow. One thing to note about twine is it will automatically convert your plover_x_name snake case name for your plugin into a plover-x-name hyphenated name for the package it uploads.

Plugins Registry#

Once it’s shown up on PyPI, you will also need to add it to the Plover Plugins Registry, so that it can be installed through Plover’s Plugins Manager.

To do this, just send a pull request to that repository, adding a line in registry.json with the name of the plugin you want to add to the registry. Once approved and merged, your plugin will appear in the Plugins Manager anywhere from right away to a few hours later depending on end user caching.