Mastering Python

Automatically registering a plugin system

One of the most common uses of metaclasses is to have classes automatically register themselves as plugins/handlers. Examples of these can be seen in many projects, such as web frameworks. Those codebases are too extensive to usefully explain here though. Hence, we'll show a simpler example showing the power of metaclasses as a self-registering plugin system:

>>> import abc


>>> class Plugins(abc.ABCMeta):
...     plugins = dict()
...
...     def __new__(metaclass, name, bases, namespace):
...         cls = abc.ABCMeta.__new__(metaclass, name, bases,
...                                   namespace)
...         if isinstance(cls.name, str):
...             metaclass.plugins[cls.name] = cls
...         return cls
...
...     @classmethod
...     def get(cls, name):
... return cls.plugins[name] ...