creating a napari plugin

This document explains how to extend napari’s functionality by writing a plugin that can be installed with pip and autodetected by napari. For more information on how plugins are implemented internally in napari, see napari plugin architecture.

Overview

napari supports plugin development through hooks: specific places in the napari codebase where functionality can be extended. For example, when a user tries to open a filepath in napari, we might want to enable plugins to extend the file formats that can be handled. A hook, then, is the place within napari where we “promise” to call functions created by external developers & installed by the user.

1. Hook Specifications: For each supported hook, we have created “hook specifications”, which are well-documented function signatures that define the API (or “contract”) that a plugin developer must adhere to when writing their function that we promise to call somewhere in the napari codebase. See Step 1: Choose a hook specification to implement.

2. Hook Implementations: To make a plugin, plugin developers then write functions (“hook implementations”) and mark that function as meeting the requirements of a specific hook specification offered by napari. See Step 2: Write your hook implementation.

3. Plugin discovery: Plugins that are installed in the same python environment as napari can make themselves known to napari. napari will then scan plugin modules for hook implementations that will then be called at the appropriate time place during the execution of napari. See Step 3: Make your plugin discoverable.

4. Plugin sharing: When you are ready to share your plugin, tag your repo with napari-plugin, push a release to pypi, and announce it on Image.sc. See Step 4: Share your plugin with the world.

Step 1: Choose a hook specification to implement

The functionality of plugins, as currently designed and implemented in napari, is rather specific in scope: They are not just independent code blocks with their own GUIs that show up next to the main napari window. Rather, plugin developers must decide which of the current hook specifications defined by napari that they would like to implement.

For a complete list of hook specifications that developers can implement, see the napari hook specification reference.

A single plugin package may implement more than one hook specification, but may not declare more the one hook implementation for any given specification.

Note

One of the primary ways that we will extend the functionality of napari over time is by identifying new ideas for hook specifications that developers can implement. If you have a plugin idea that requires napari to create a new hook specification, we’d love to hear about it! Please think about what the signature of your proposed hook specification would look like, and where within the napari codebase you’d like your hook implementation to be called, and open a feature request in the napari issue tracker with your proposal.

Let’s take the napari_get_reader() hook (our primary “reader plugin” hook) as an example. It is defined as:

LayerData = Union[Tuple[Any], Tuple[Any, Dict], Tuple[Any, Dict, str]]
ReaderFunction = Callable[[str], List[LayerData]]

@napari_hook_specification(firstresult=True)
def napari_get_reader(
    path: Union[str, List[str]]
) -> Optional[ReaderFunction]:
    ...

Note that it takes a str or a list of str and either returns None or a function. From the docstring of the hook specification, we see that the implementation should return None if the path is of an unrecognized format, otherwise it should return a ReaderFunction, which is a function that takes a str (the filepath to read) and returns a list of LayerData, where LayerData is any one of (data,), (data, meta), or (data, meta, layer_type).

That seems like a bit of a mouthful! But it’s a precise (though flexible) contract that you can follow, and know that napari will handle the rest.

Step 2: Write your hook implementation

Once you have identified the hook specification that you want to implement, you have to create a hook implementation: a function that accepts the arguments specified by the hook specification signature and returns a value with the expected return type.

Here’s an example hook implementation for napari_get_reader() that enables napari to open a numpy binary file with a .npy extension (previously saved with numpy.save())

import numpy as np
from napari_plugin_engine import napari_hook_implementation


def npy_file_reader(path):
   array = np.load(path)
   # return it as a list of LayerData tuples,
   # here with no optional metadata
   return [(array,)]


# this line is explained below in "Decorating your function..."
@napari_hook_implementation
def napari_get_reader(path):
   # remember, path can be a list, so we check it's type first...
   # (this example plugin doesn't handle lists)
   if isinstance(path, str) and path.endswith(".npy"):
      # If we recognize the format, we return the actual reader function
      return npy_file_reader
   # otherwise we return None.
   return None

Decorating your function with HookImplementationMarker

In order to let napari know that one of your functions satisfies the API of one of the napari hook specifications, you must decorate your function with an instance of HookImplementationMarker, initialized with the name "napari". As a convenience, napari provides this decorator at napari_plugin_engine.napari_hook_implementation as shown in the example above.

However, it’s not required to import from or depend on napari at all when writing a plugin. You can import a napari_hook_implementation decorator directly from napari_plugin_engine (a very lightweight dependency that uses only standard lib python).

from napari_plugin_engine import napari_hook_implementation

Matching hook implementations to specifications

By default, napari matches your implementation to one of our hook specifications by looking at the name of your decorated function. So in the example above, because hook implementation was literally named napari_get_reader, it gets interpreted as an implementation for the hook specification of the same name.

@napari_hook_implementation
def napari_get_reader(path: str):
   ...

However, you may also mark any function as satisfying a particular napari hook specification (regardless of the function’s name) by providing the name of the target hook specification to the specname argument in your implementation decorator:

@napari_hook_implementation(specname="napari_get_reader")
def whatever_name_you_want(path: str):
   ...

This allows you to specify multiple hook implementations of the same hook specification in the same module or class, without needing a separate entry point.

Step 3: Make your plugin discoverable

Packages and modules installed in the same environment as napari may make themselves “discoverable” to napari using package metadata, as outlined in the Python Packaging Authority guide.

By providing an entry_points argument with the key napari.plugin to setup() in setup.py, plugins can register themselves for discovery.

For example if you have a package named mypackage with a submodule napari_plugin where you have decorated one or more napari hook implementations, then if you include in setup.py:

# setup.py

setup(
   ...
   entry_points={'napari.plugin': 'plugin_name = mypackage.napari_plugin'},
   ...
)

… then napari will search the mypackage.napari_plugin module for functions decorated with the HookImplementationMarker("napari") decorator and register them the plugin name "plugin_name".

A user would then be able to use napari, extended with your package’s functionality by simply installing your package along with napari:

pip install napari mypackage

Step 4: Share your plugin with the world

Once you are ready to share your plugin, upload the Python package to PyPI and it can then be installed with a simple pip install mypackage. If you used the Cookiecutter template, you can also setup automated deployments.

Be sure to use the ‘Framework :: napari’ [classifier](https://pypi.org/classifiers/) in your setup.py file, which will allow your package to be [easily searched on PyPI](https://pypi.org/search/?c=Framework+%3A%3A+napari) as offering functionality for napari.

If you are using Github, add the “napari-plugin” topic to your repo so other developers can see your work.

When you are ready for users, announce your plugin on the Image.sc Forum.

Cookiecutter template

To quickly generate a new napari plugin project, you may wish to use the cookiecutter-napari-plugin template. This uses the cookiecutter command line utility, which will ask you a few questions about your project and get you started with a ready-to-go package layout where you can begin implementing your plugin.

Install cookiecutter and use the template as follows:

pip install cookiecutter
cookiecutter https://github.com/napari/cookiecutter-napari-plugin

Example Plugins

For a minimal working plugin example, see the napari-dv plugin, which allows napari to read the Priism/MRC/Deltavision image file format.

For a more thorough plugin see napari-aicsimageio, one of the first community plugins developed for napari. This plugin takes advantage of entry_point discovery to offer multiple readers for both in-memory and lazy-loading of image files.

More examples of plugins can be found on the “napari-plugin” Github topic.

Help

If you run into trouble creating your plugin, please don’t hesitate to reach out for help in the Image.sc Forum. Alternatively, if you find a bug or have a specific feature request for plugin support, please open an issue at our github issue tracker.