lektor-website/content/docs/plugins/dev/contents.lr

title: Development
---
summary: A quick introduction to plugin development.
---
sort_key: 10
---
body:

If you want to dive into plugin development yourself, this guide will get you
going quickly.  Before we can get started you need to have a Lektor project
we can temporarily add the plugin to and you need to have the `lektor`
[command line tool](../../cli/) installed.

## Enable Development Mode

When developing plugins it's very useful to enable Lektor's development
mode before starting the server.  This can be achieved by exporting the
`LEKTOR_DEV` environment variable and setting it to `1`:

```
$ export LEKTOR_DEV=1
$ lektor server
```

With that in place, Lektor will automatically restart the development server
when the plugin is changing.

## Creating A Package

Plugins come in packages.  To make one, just create a folder with a sensible
name (typically the name of your plugin minus the `lektor-` prefix) in your
`packages/` folder.

You can either do this manually or you can use the `lektor dev new-plugin`
command (see [new-plugin :ref](../../cli/dev/new-plugin/)) which will create
this folder structure for you:

```
$ lektor dev new-plugin
```

This will guide you through a flow which ends up creating a new plugin
package in the packages folder.

Alternatively you can manually create a `packages/hello-world/` folder.

Once that is done, we need to create a `setup.py` file which tells Lektor
what your plugin needs to run.  This will already be created for you if
you used the wizard.

```python
from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name='lektor-hello-world',
    version='0.1',
    py_modules=['lektor_hello_world'],
    entry_points={
        'lektor.plugins': [
            'hello-world = lektor_hello_world:HelloWorldPlugin',
        ]
    },
    install_requires=[]
)
```

So going line by line, these are what the things mean:

* `setuptools` is a module that helps us install the package with the
  Python interpreter that Lektor uses.  We only need the setup function
  from it for this example.
* `name` is the name of the plugin when it's published to the Python package
  index where all Lektor plugins go.  As such it should be prefixed with
  `lektor-` to make it not clash with other packages on the index.
* `version` identifies the version.  During local development it does not
  matter what you write here, but it will play a role once you start
  publishing your packages.  Users need to reference exact versions of these
  plugins when using them.
* `py_modules`: this is a list of modules that your plugin needs to run.
  This should always be exactly one module named `lektor_XXX` where `XXX`
  is your plugin name with underscores instead of dashes as separators.
  If you need more than one module you should use a package instead.  This is
  not covered here, but you can find this in the [setuptools documentation
  :ext](https://pythonhosted.org/setuptools/).
* `entry_points`: this is meta data that is needed to associate our package
  with Lektor.  Lektor will load all plugins in the `lektor.plugins` list.
  It can be a list of definitions in the form `plugin-name = import_path`.
  The plugin name is what will show up in the plugin list in Lektor,
  the import path should be the dotted import path to the module that contains
  the plugin followed by a colon (`:`) with the class name afterwards.
* `install_requires`: this is a list of dependencies for our plugin.  We
  leave it empty here as we do not depend on anything in this simple
  example.

## Creating The Plugin

Now it's time to create our first plugin that does absolutely nothing.  We
create a new file with the name `lektor_hello_world.py` next to our
`setup.py` and put the following things in:

```python
from lektor.pluginsystem import Plugin

class HelloWorldPlugin(Plugin):
    name = 'Hello World'
    description = 'This is a demo plugin for testing purposes.'
```

If you now start your lektor server with `lektor server` you should
see some output that indicates that the plugin was loaded.  You can also
get a list with `lektor plugins list`:

```
$ lektor plugins list
hello-world: Hello World
  This is a demo plugin for testing purposes.
  path: /Users/john/demo/packages/hello-world
  import-name: lektor_hello_world:HelloWorldPlugin
```

## Hooking Events

Plugins in Lektor are based on the concept of hooking events.  There are many
events that can be hooked but we will only cover a very basic one here,
the `process_template_context` event.  To respond to it, we need to implement
a function named `on_process_template_context`:

```python
import random

MESSAGES = [
    'Reticulating splines',
    'Populating slots',
    'Possessing pawns',
]

def get_random_message():
    return random.choice(MESSAGES)

class HelloWorldPlugin(Plugin):
    name = 'Hello World'
    description = 'This is a demo plugin for testing purposes.'

    def on_process_template_context(self, context, **extra):
        context['get_random_message'] = get_random_message
```

This will inject a function with the name `get_random_message` into our
template context whenever a template is rendered.  This means that we
can access this function from templates then:

```html+jinja
<p>Message of the page: {{ get_random_message() }}
```

## What Plugins Can Do

To understand what you can do with plugins have a look at the
[Plugin API :ref](../../api/plugins/).