I have always been fascinated by the idea of plugins - user-developed modules that are not part of the core application, but that nevertheless allow extending the application's capabilities. Many applications above a certain size allow some level of customization by users. There are many different approaches and many names for it (extensions, scripting interface, modules, components); I'll simply say "plugins" from now on.

The fun thing about plugins is that they cross application and language domains. You can find plugin infrastructures for everything ranging from IDEs, to web servers to games. Plugins can be developed in language X extending an application mainly based on language Y, for a wide variety of X and Y.

My plan is to explore the design space of plugin infrastructures, looking at various implementation strategies and existing solutions in well-known applications. But for that, I need to first describe some basic terms and concepts - a common language that will let us reason about plugins.

Example - plugins for a Python application

I'll start with an example, by presenting a simple application and a plugin infrastructure for it. Both the application and plugins will be coded in Python 3.

Let's start by introducing the task. The example is a small but functional part of some kind of a publishing system, let's say a blogging engine. It's the part that turns marked-up text into HTML. To borrow from reST, the supported markup is:

before markup :role:`text` after markup

Here "role" defines the mark-up type, and "text" is the text to which the mark-up is applied. Sample roles (again, from reST interpreted roles) are code, math or superscript [1].

Now, where do plugins come in here? The idea is to let the core application do the text parsing, leaving the specific role implementation to plugins. In other words, I'd like to enable plugin writers to easily add roles to the application. This is what the idea of plugins is all about: instead of hard-coding the application's functionality, let users extend it. Power users love customizing applications for their specific needs, and may improve your application beyond your original intentions. From your point of view, it's like getting work done for free - a win-win situation.

Anyway, there are a myriad ways to implement plugins in Python [2]. I like the following approach:

class IPluginRegistry(type):
    plugins = []
    def __init__(cls, name, bases, attrs):
        if name != 'IPlugin':

class IPlugin(object, metaclass=IPluginRegistry):
    def __init__(self, post=None, db=None):
        """ Initialize the plugin. Optinally provide the db.Post that is
            being processed and the db.DB it belongs to.
        self.post = post
        self.db = db

    """ Plugin classes inherit from IPlugin. The methods below can be
        implemented to provide services.
    def get_role_hook(self, role_name):
        """ Return a function accepting role contents.
            The function will be called with a single argument - the role
            contents, and should return what the role gets replaced with.
            None if the plugin doesn't provide a hook for this role.
        return None

A plugin is a class that inherits from IPlugin. Some metaclass trickery makes sure that by the very act of inheriting from it, the plugin registers itself in the system.

The get_role_hook method is an example of a hook. A hook is something an application exposes, and plugins can attach to. By attaching to a hook (in our case - implementing the get_role_hook method), the plugin can let the application know it wants to participate in the relevant task. Here, a plugin implementing the hook will get called by the application to find out which roles it supports.

Here is a sample plugin:

class TtFormatter(IPlugin):
    """ Acts on the 'tt' role, placing the contents inside <tt> tags.
    def get_role_hook(self, role_name):
        return self._tt_hook if role_name == 'tt' else None

    def _tt_hook(self, contents):
        return '<tt>' + contents + '</tt>'

It implements the following transformation:

text :tt:`in tt tag` here


text <tt>in tt tag</tt> here

As you can see, I chose to let the hook return a function. This is useful since it can give the application immediate indication of whether the plugin supports some role at all (if it returns None, it doesn't). The application can also cache the function returned by plugins for more efficient invocation later. There are, of course, many variations on this theme. For example, the plugin could return a list of all the roles it supports.

Now it would be interesting to see how plugins are discovered, i.e. how does the application know which plugins are present in the system? Again, Python's dynamism lets us easily implement a very flexible discovery scheme:

def discover_plugins(dirs):
    """ Discover the plugin classes contained in Python files, given a
        list of directory names to scan. Return a list of plugin classes.
    for dir in dirs:
        for filename in os.listdir(dir):
            modname, ext = os.path.splitext(filename)
            if ext == '.py':
                file, path, descr = imp.find_module(modname, [dir])
                if file:
                    # Loading the module registers the plugin in
                    # IPluginRegistry
                    mod = imp.load_module(modname, file, path, descr)
    return IPluginRegistry.plugins

This function can be used by the applications to find and load plugins. It gets a list of directories in which to look for Python modules. Each module is loaded, which executes the class definitions within it. Those classes that inherit from IPlugin get registered with IPluginRegistry, which can then be queried.

You will notice that the constructor of IPlugin takes two optional arguments - post and db. For plugins that have more than just the most basic capabilities, the application should also expose an API to itself which would let the plugins query and manipulate it. The post and db arguments do that - each plugin will get a Post object that represents the blog post it operates upon, as well as a DB object that represents the main blog database.

To see how these can be used by a plugin, let's add another hook to IPlugin:

def get_contents_hook(self):
    """ Return a function accepting full document contents.
        The functin will be called with a single argument - the document
        contents (after paragraph splitting and role processing), and
        should return the transformed contents.
        None if the plugin doesn't provide a hook for this role.
    return None

This hook allows plugins to register functions that transform the whole contents of a post, not just text marked-up with roles [3]. Here's a sample plugin that uses it:

class Narcissist(IPlugin):
    def __init__(self, post, db):
        super().__init__(post, db)
        self.repl = '<b>I ({0})</b>'.format(self.post.author)

    def get_contents_hook(self):
        return self._contents_hook

    def _contents_hook(self, contents):
        return re.sub(r'\bI\b', self.repl, contents)

As its name suggests, this is a plugin for users with narcissistic tendencies. It finds all the occurrences of "I" in the text, adds the author name in parens and puts it in bold. The idea here is to show how the post object passed to the plugin can be used to access information from the application. Exposing such details to plugins makes the infrastructure extremely flexible.

Finally, let's see how the application actually uses the plugins. Here's a simple htmlize function that gets a post and db objects, as well as a list of plugins. It does its own transformation of the post contents by enclosing all paragraphs in <p>...</p> tags and then hands the job over to the plugins, first running the role-specific hooks and then the whole contents hooks [4]:

RoleMatch = namedtuple('RoleMatch', 'name contents')

def htmlize(post, db, plugins=[]):
    """ pass
    contents = post.contents

    # Plugins are classes - we need to instantiate them to get objects.
    plugins = [P(post, db) for P in plugins]

    # Split the contents to paragraphs
    paragraphs = re.split(r'\n\n+', contents)
    for i, p in enumerate(paragraphs):
        paragraphs[i] = '<p>' + p.replace('\n', ' ') + '</p>'

    contents = '\n\n'.join(paragraphs)

    # Find roles in the contents. Create a list of parts, where each
    # part is either text that has no roles in it, or a RoleMatch
    # object.
    pos = 0
    parts = []
    while True:
        match = ROLE_REGEX.search(contents, pos)
        if match is None:
        parts.append(RoleMatch(match.group(1), match.group(2)))
        pos = match.end()

    # Ask plugins to act on roles
    for i, part in enumerate(parts):
        if isinstance(part, RoleMatch):
            parts[i] = _plugin_replace_role(
                            part.name, part.contents, plugins)

    # Build full contents back again, and ask plugins to act on
    # contents.
    contents = ''.join(parts)
    for p in plugins:
        contents_hook = p.get_contents_hook()
        if contents_hook:
            contents = contents_hook(contents)

    return contents

def _plugin_replace_role(name, contents, plugins):
    """ The first plugin that handles this role is used.
    for p in plugins:
        role_hook = p.get_role_hook(name)
        if role_hook:
            return role_hook(contents)
    # If no plugin handling this role is found, return its original form
    return ':{0}:`{1}`'.format(name, contents)

If you're interested in the code, this sample application (with a simple driver that discovers plugins by calling discover_plugins and calls htmlize) can be download from here.

Fundamental plugin concepts

Having read about plugins and studied the code of many applications, it became clear to me that to describe a certain plugin infrastructure you really need to look just at 4 fundamental aspects/concepts [5]:

  1. Discovery
  2. Registration
  3. Application hooks to which plugins attach (aka. "mount points")
  4. Exposing application capabilities back to plugins (aka. extension API)

There are some areas of overlap between these (e.g. sometimes it's hard to distinguish discovery from registration), but I believe that together they cover over 95% of what one needs to understand when studying a specific application's plugin infrastructure.


This is the mechanism by which a running application can find out which plugins it has at its disposal. To "discover" a plugin, one has to look in certain places, and also know what to look for. In our example, the discover_plugins function implements this - plugins are Python classes that inherit from a known base class, contained in modules located in known places.


This is the mechanism by which a plugin tells an application - "I'm here, ready to do work". Admittedly, registration usually has a large overlap with discovery, but I still want to keep the two concepts separate since it makes things more explicit (not in all languages registration is as automatic as our example demonstrates).


Hooks are also called "mount points" or "extension points". These are the places where the plugin can "attach" itself to the application, signaling that it wants to know about certain events and participate in the flow. The exact nature of hooks is very much dependent on the application. In our example, hooks allow plugins to intervene in the text-to-HTML transformation process performed by the application. The example also demonstrates both coarse grained hooks (processing the whole contents) and fine grained hooks (processing only certain marked-up chunks).

Exposing an application API to plugins

To make plugins truly powerful and versatile, the application needs to give them access to itself, by means of exposing an API the plugins can use. In our example the API is relatively simple - the application simply passes some of its own internal objects to the plugins. APIs tend to get much more complex when multiple languages are involved. I hope to show some interesting examples in future articles.

Examining some well-known applications

Now that we have the concepts well-defined, I want to finish this article by examining the plugin infrastructures of a couple of very common applications. Both are written in high-level languages, which makes the infrastructure relatively simple. I will present more complex infrastructures in future articles, once I cover the technical details of implementing plugins in C or C++.


Mercurial (Hg) is a popular VCS (Version Control System), written in Python. Mercurial is well known for its extensibility - a lot of its functionality is provided by Python extensions. Some extensions became popular enough to be distributed with the core application, and some need to be downloaded separately.

Discovery: extensions that the user wants loaded have to be explicitly listed in the [extensions] section of the Mercurial configuration file (.hgrc).

Registration: extensions are Python modules that export certain functions (e.g. uisetup) and values (e.g. cmdtable) Mercurial looks for. The existence of any one such function or value amounts to registering the extension with Mercurial.

Hooks: top-level functions like uisetup and extsetup serve as coarse-grained hooks. Finer-grained hooks can be explicitly registered by calling, for example, ui.setconfig('hooks', ...) on a ui object passed into uisetup and command callbacks.

Application API: Mercurial application objects like ui and repo passed to hooks provide a means to query the application and act on its behalf.


Wordpress is the most popular blogging engine on the internet, and possibly the most popular content management system overall. It's written in PHP, and its extensive plugin system (plugins are also written in PHP) are arguably its most important feature.

Discovery: plugins must be .php files (or directories with such files) placed in the special directory wp-content/plugins. They must contain a special comment with metadata at the top, which Wordpress uses to recognize them as valid plugins.

Registration & Hooks: plugins register themselves by adding hooks via special API calls. The hooks are of two kinds - filters and actions. Filters are very similar to the plugins shown in our example (transform text to its final form). Actions are more generic and allows plugins to piggy-back on many different operations Wordpress is performing.

Application API: Wordpress exposes its internals to plugins rather bluntly. The core application objects (such as $wpdb) are simply available as globals for the plugins to use.


This article's main goal was to define a common language to reason about plugins. The four concepts should provide one with a tool to examine and study the plugin infrastructure of a given application: 1) how are plugins discovered, 2) how do they register themselves with the application, 3) which hooks can plugins utilize to extend the application and 4) what API does the application expose to plugins.

The examples presented here were mainly about Python applications with Python plugins (with the Wordpress example being PHP, which is on about the same level of expressivity as Python). Plugins for static languages, and especially cross-language plugins provide more implementation challenges. In future articles I aim to examine some implementation strategies for plugins in C, C++ and mixed static-dynamic languages, as well as study the plugin infrastructures of some well-known applications.

[1]Simpler mark-up like surrounding text with asterisks (i.e. *italic*) can be supported similarly, but I wanted to focus on plugins here, not text parsing.
[2]And any other language, for that purpose. This is probably why there are very few well-established plugin frameworks in existence (even in low-level languages like C or C++). It's too easy (and tempting) to roll your own.
[3]Naturally, there's a tradeoff here. On one hand, this hook enables very elaborate transformations by the plugins. On the other hand, the application doesn't give much to the plugin - each plugin should parse the contents itself. Compare this to get_role_hook, where the application does the parsing itself and passes the plugin just the role and its contents.
[4]Note that it makes no attempt being efficient. For example, there's no real use in asking plugins about the roles they know every single time - this information can be cached.
[5]Since the following discussion is somewhat abstract, I deliberately started the article with an example. It should provide a tangible base to relate the concepts to.