Climetlab Plugin mechanism

The generic CliMetLab plugin mechanism relies on creating a Python package using the Python plugin mechanism based on entry_points. Additionally, dataset plugins plugins can be created using YAML file. A Dataset plugin template (https://github.com/ecmwf-lab/climetlab-cookiecutter-dataset) has been designed to create the boilerplate code for a plugin.

After installation, the plugin registers itself thanks to the entry points in the setup.py file, making CliMetLab aware of the new capabilities. Then, the user can take advantage of the shared code though the enhanced climetlab.load_dataset(), climetlab.load_dataset() and climetlab.plot_map(), etc.

For pip packages using setuptools, creating a plugin consists in adding an entry in setup.py:

  setuptools.setup(
      name = 'climetlab-package-name',
      ...
      entry_points={"climetlab.<plugintype>":
              ["foo = climetlab_package_name:FooClass",
               "bar = climetlab_package_name:BarClass"]
      },
  )

In this package called climetlab-package-name, the class climetlab_package_name.FooClass provides Python code related to "foo". Additional code related to "bar" is located in the class climetlab_package_name.BarClass. The <plugintype> is one of the plugin type in the table above: dataset, sources, readers, etc. See the individual documentation for each plugin type for detailed examples.

Todo

Link to documentation about climetlab.plugin.register().