Writing a plugin

Bazaar

Writing a plugin

Introduction

Plugins are very similar to bzr core functionality. They can import anything in bzrlib. A plugin may simply override standard functionality, but most plugins supply new commands.

Creating a new command

To create a command, make a new object that derives from bzrlib.commands.Command, and name it cmd_foo, where foo is the name of your command. If you create a command whose name contains an underscore, it will appear in the UI with the underscore turned into a hyphen. For example, cmd_baz_import will appear as baz-import. For examples of how to write commands, please see builtins.py.

Once you’ve created a command you must register the command with bzrlib.commands.register_command(cmd_foo). You must register the command when your file is imported, otherwise bzr will not see it.

Specifying a plugin version number

Simply define version_info to be a tuple defining the current version number of your plugin. eg. version_info = (0, 9, 0) version_info = (0, 9, 0, 'dev', 0)

Plugin searching rules

Bzr will scan ~/.bazaar/plugins and bzrlib/plugins for plugins by default. You can override this with BZR_PLUGIN_PATH (see User Reference for details).

Plugins may be either modules or packages. If your plugin is a single file, you can structure it as a module. If it has multiple files, or if you want to distribute it as a bzr branch, you should structure it as a package, i.e. a directory with an __init__.py file.

More information

Please feel free to contribute your plugin to BzrTools, if you think it would be useful to other people.

See the Bazaar Developer Guide for details on Bazaar’s development guidelines and policies.