William Minchin: AutoLoader Plugin 1.0.2 for Pelican Released

AutoLoader is a plugin for Pelican, a static site generator written in Python.

AutoLoader is a “meta plugin” in that it doesn’t directly affect your Pelican site, but rather works to make your other plugins better. By way of background, Pelican 4.5 added the ability to autoload plugins that exist in the pelican.plugins namespace. This plugin allows you to extend this autoload ability to any arbitrary namespace. In particlar, it defaults to extending this ability to my minchin.pelican.plugins namespace, and thus will autoload my other plugins, if installed. It can also be used to add plugin autoloading to earlier version of Pelican.

Personally, these two abilities (to autoload my other plugins and to add autoloading to older versions of Pelican) are significant, because I am currently in the process of upgrading from Pelican 3.7 to the current version (4.7) and what was holding me back was the effort to move my plugins from their current minchin.pelican.plugins namespace. With AutoLoader, it makes it simple to upgrade my Pelican version, regardless of whether the plugins have (yet? ever?) moved namespaces. It also allows me to continue creating custom/personal versions of plugins in my namespace, particularly in cases where the original author is no longer updating their plugin.

Installation

The simplest way to install AutoLoader is to use pip:

pip install minchin.pelican.plugins.autoloader

Configuration

If you are running Pelican 4.5 or newer, and haven’t manually defined PLUGINS in your pelicanconf.py site configuration file, nothing more is needed: AutoLoader will autoload itself :) Without further configuration, it will autoload any installed plugins in the minchin.pelican.plugins namespace (and Pelican itself will autoload any installed plugins in the pelican.plugins namespace).

If you are using a older version of Pelican (i.e. before v4.5) and/or you have defined PLUGINS, you’ll need to add AutoLoader to your list of plugins, like this:

# pelicanconf.py

from minchin.pelican.plugins import autoloader

PLUGINS = [
    # others...
    autoloader,
]

If you want to add additional namespaces for AutoLoader to work from, define AUTOLOADER_NAMESPACES (as a list or other iterable) in your pelicanconf.py file. For example, if you want to autoload the pelican.plugins namespace (useful if you’re still using Pelican 3.7 or 4.2 or have defined PLUGINS, and the configuration this site is currently using):

# pelicanconf.py

from minchin.pelican.plugins import autoloader

AUTOLOADER_NAMESPACES = autoloader.DEFAULT_NAMESPACE_LIST + [
    "pelican.plugins",
    # other namespaces
]

This Release

v1.0.2 is the first public release. Earlier version numbers got “eaten” making sure the version pushed to PyPI would work as expected.

Known Issues

• the release machinery used relies on invoke, which has not yet been updated to be compatible with Python 3.10. Beyond pushing out releases, this plugin should work with Python 3.10.
• plugins activated by AutoLoader do not show running pelican-plugins. (pelican-plugins was a script added by Pelican 4.5 to show namespace plugins currently active). AutoLoader however should be itself listed (although likely as pelican.plugins.autoloader).

Forward Looking Thoughts

In my last plugin release post, I’d commented that there were “only 10 more plugins to go!” (i.e. to move to the pelican.plugins namespace, and presumably under the Pelican-Plugins organization on GitHub). This handily sidesteps those transitions from keeping me from upgrading Pelican on my personal site! I’m feeling much closer to getting this site upgraded to the current version of Pelican.

I plan on making releases of my other plugins shortly to rely on this and to update the installation instructions to that end.

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