Local Development & Debugging

When developing a plugin, registering via entry points requires your package to be fully installed (e.g. pip install -e .). For quick iteration and debugging you can bypass this by registering your plugin module directly with the plugin manager.

Registering Without an Installed Package

The plugin manager (pm) is accessible from flync_converter.registry. Calling pm.register() on your module and then registry.load_plugins() is equivalent to what entry points do at runtime — but without the package installation step.

from flync_converter.registry import pm, registry
import my_format.plugin as my_plugin

# Register the plugin module directly
pm.register(my_plugin)

# Load all converters (built-ins + anything registered above)
registry.load_plugins()

After this your converter is available in the registry like any installed plugin:

from flync_converter.registry import registry

converter = registry["my_format"]

Example: Iterative Development Script

# dev_test.py — run from your plugin repo root
from flync_converter.registry import pm, registry
import src.my_format.plugin as my_plugin

pm.register(my_plugin)
registry.load_plugins()

print("Registered converters:", list(registry.keys()))

# Exercise your converter directly
from flync_converter import convert
convert("input.flync", "output.my_format", destination_type="my_format")

Example: Registering in Tests

Use the same approach in your test suite so tests run without requiring the package to be installed as a distribution:

# tests/conftest.py
import pytest
from flync_converter.registry import pm, registry
import my_format.plugin as my_plugin

@pytest.fixture(autouse=True)
def register_plugin():
    if not pm.is_registered(my_plugin):
        pm.register(my_plugin)
    registry.load_plugins()

Note

pm.is_registered() guards against double-registration if load_plugins() is called multiple times across tests.

How the Plugin Module Must Look

The module you pass to pm.register() must expose a register_converters function decorated with @hookspec (same as when using entry points):

# my_format/plugin.py
from flync_converter.base import BaseConverter
from flync_converter.hookspec import hookspec

class MyConverter(BaseConverter):
    name = "my_format"

    def can_decode(self):
        return True

    def encode(self, source):
        ...

    def decode(self):
        ...

@hookspec
def register_converters():
    return [MyConverter()]

This is the same structure required for production — so your dev registration and your production entry point use identical code.

When to Switch to Entry Points

Once your plugin is ready for distribution or integration testing, switch to the standard entry point approach described in Creating a Plugin. The direct registration method is intended for local development only.