TLJH Plugins#

TLJH plugins are the official way to make customized ‘spins’ or ‘stacks’ with TLJH as the base. For example, the earth sciences community can make a plugin that installs commonly used packages, set up authentication and pre-download useful datasets. The mybinder.org community can make a plugin that gives you a single-node, single-repository mybinder.org. Plugins are very powerful, so the possibilities are endless.

Design#

pluggy is used to implement plugin functionality. TLJH exposes specific hooks that your plugin can provide implementations for. This allows us to have specific hook points in the application that can be explicitly extended by plugins, balancing the need to change TLJH internals in the future with the stability required for a good plugin ecosystem.

Installing Plugins#

Include --plugin <install_name> in the Installer script. See Customizing the Installer for more info.

Writing a simple plugins#

We shall try to write a simple plugin that installs a few libraries, and use it to explain how the plugin mechanism works. We shall call this plugin tljh-simple.

Plugin directory layout#

We recommend creating a new git repo for your plugin. Plugins are normal python packages - however, since they are usually simpler, we recommend they live in one file.

For tljh-simple, the repository’s structure should look like:

tljh_simple:
 - tljh_simple.py
 - setup.py
 - README.md
 - LICENSE

The README.md (or README.rst file) contains human readable information about what your plugin does for your users. LICENSE specifies the license used by your plugin - we recommend the 3-Clause BSD License, since that is what is used by TLJH itself.

setup.py - metadata & registration#

setup.py marks this as a python package, and contains metadata about the package itself. It should look something like:

from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name="tljh-simple",
    author="YuviPanda",
    version="0.1",
    license="3-clause BSD",
    url='https://github.com/yuvipanda/tljh-simple',
    entry_points={"tljh": ["simple = tljh_simple"]},
    py_modules=["tljh_simple"],
)

This is a mostly standard setup.py file. entry_points={"tljh": ["simple = tljh_simple]} ‘registers’ the module tljh_simple (in file tljh_simple.py) with TLJH as a plugin.

tljh_simple.py - implementation#

In tljh_simple.py, you provide implementations for whichever hooks you want to extend.

A hook implementation is a function that has the following characteristics:

  1. Has same name as the hook

  2. Accepts some or all of the parameters defined for the hook

  3. Is decorated with the hookimpl decorator function, imported from tljh.hooks.

The current list of available hooks and when they are called can be seen in tljh/hooks.py in the source repository. Example implementations of each hook can be referenced from integration-tests/plugins/simplest/tljh_simplest.py.

This example provides an implementation for the tljh_extra_user_conda_packages hook, which can return a list of conda packages that’ll be installed in users’ environment from conda-forge.

from tljh.hooks import hookimpl

@hookimpl
def tljh_extra_user_conda_packages():
    return [
        'xarray',
        'iris',
        'dask',
    ]

Publishing plugins#

Plugins are python packages and should be published on PyPI. Users can also install them directly from GitHub - although this is not good long term practice.

The python package should be named tljh-<pluginname>.

List of known plugins#

If you are looking for a way to extend or customize your TLJH deployment, you might want to look for existing plugins.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of known TLJH plugins:

If you have authored a plugin, please open a PR to add it to this list!

We also recommend adding the tljh-plugin topic to the GitHub repository to make it more discoverable: topics/tljh-plugin