Writing your own plugins

Jira-select relies on setuptools entrypoints for determining what functions, commands, and formatters are available. This makes it easy to write your own as long as you’re familiar with python packaging, and if you’re not, you can also register functions at runtime.

Commands

To write your own commands, you need to:

1. Create a class that is a subclass of jira_select.plugin.BaseCommand. This command:

   • Must implement a handle function.

2. Register that class via a setuptools entrypoint.

   • Your entrypoint should be in the jira_select.commands section.

   • The name of your entrypoint will become the command’s name.

Functions

For functions, you have two choices:

1. You can create and install a user script into your user functions and within that script register a function using the method described in Direct Registration below.

3. If you plan to distribute your function on PyPI or would like for it to be installable generally, you can create an entrypoint; see Entrypoint below for details.

Direct Registration

1. Create a function in a python file somewhere.

2. Wrapping that function in jira_select.plugin.register_function.

3. Install that user script using the install-user-script command.

For example, if you have a file named my_user_function.py in your current directory with the following contents:

from jira_select.plugin import register_function


@register_function
def my_important_function(value):
   """Returns length of `value`

   This function isn't doing anything useful, really, but
   you could of course make it useful if you were to write
   your own.

   """
   return len(value)

you could install it with:

jira-select install-user-function my_user_function.py

and after that, you will have access to my_important_function in a query like:

select:
- my_important_function(key)
from: issues

Entrypoint

1. Create a class that is a subclass of jira_select.plugin.Function. This command:

   • Must implement a __call__ function.

2. Register that class via a setuptools entrypoint.

   • Your entrypoint should be in the jira_select.functions section.

Formatters

To write your own formatter, you need to:

1. Create a class that is a subclass of jira_select.plugin.BaseFormatter. This command:

   • Must implement a writerow function.

   • Must implement a get_file_extension classmethod returning your format’s file extension.

   • May implement an open method for any setup functionality.

   • May implement an close method for any teardown functionality.

2. Register that class via a setuptools entrypoint.

   • Your entrypoint should be in the jira_select.formatters section.