Going through the docs, it seems it should be enough to add to

plugins

to register a published plugin, but my experience is that I also need to add it to

backend_packages

. Bug or feature?

Depends if the plugin sets up its entry points the right way: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/blob/e5987065372b1a617fc13ae53b0cab5ef9bbf098/pants-plugins/src/python/internal_backend/utilities/register.py#L121-L151

Aahh… right. Did I miss that information in the docs, or is it just not there? Would be super helpful 🙂

It's not there - we haven't widely publicized plugins yet because the API is too unstable. Part of an exciting side effect of the push for supporting multiple languages (e.g. Docker, Terraform, Go, Java) is that it's pushing our APIs in good ways that will help us get closer to a stable API

Oh, ok, yeah I can see that makes sense. Thanks 😉 Edit: kind of. As there is documentation for how to create plugins, I don’t really see how this omission is helping limiting the spread…

I think the difference is publishing the plugin to PyPI where third-parties are now consuming your plugin, vs. an internal plugin that only your org needs to consume We do really want to build a plugin ecosystem for Pants, similar to Pytest and Flake8. But in the meantime to being more stable, we've been encouraging people to contribute directly to Pants itself so that we can be more confident the experience will be stable/good for end users depending on it (It may be worth revisiting that also)

That is a fair point, so perhaps a slip to mention the published plugins too, then? 😛

What do you mean a slip?

mistake

Ah, I see. Yeah, not sure we should be doing that atm. Or...probably better is still document it for completeness, but encourage plugin authors to add warnings to their READMEs that it's not stable?

My situation is a hybrid one, as I want to publish my plugin, so we can use it easily in all our projects, but I only do it internally, not for the wider community