Writing Plugins

For general information about plugins, see https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/wiki/User-plugins

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/spyderlib/plugins/__init__.py).

├── spyder_<PLUGIN_NAME>
    ├── __init__.py
    ├── module_a.py
    ├── images   # Resources
    ├── locale   # Translations
    └── other_internal_modules
        ├── __init__.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_io_dcm

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

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