Writing Plugins

For general information about plugins, see User-plugins

For creating new plugins you could use spyder-plugin-cookiecutter

UI plugins

These third-party plugins may communicate with other Spyder components through the plugin interface (see https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/blob/master/spyder/api/plugins.py).

spyder_<PLUGIN_NAME>
├── __init__.py
├── <PLUGIN_NAME>plugin.py
├── tests/
│   ├── __init__.py
│   └── test_plugin.py
├── utils/
│   └── __init__.py
├── assets/
├── locale/   # Translations
└── widgets/
    ├── __init__.py
    ├── <PLUGIN_NAME>gui.py
    └── tests
        ├── __init__.py
        └── test_report_widget.py

I/O Spyder plugins

How to create your own I/O Spyder plugins:

• Create a Python module named spyder_io_foobar where foobar is the name of your plugin

• Write your loading function and/or your saving function:

  • load:
    • input is a string: filename
    • output is a tuple with two elements: dictionary containing at least one element (key is the variable name) and error message (or None)
  • save:
    • input is a tuple with two elements: data (dictionary), filename
    • output is a string or None: error message or None if no error occured

• Define the global variables FORMAT_NAME, FORMAT_EXT, FORMAT_LOAD and FORMAT_SAVE. See the example of DICOM images support:

  • https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/tree/master/spyder/plugins/io_dcm

• More examples of load/save functions may be found here:

  • https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/blob/master/spyder/utils/iofuncs.py