# Guidelines for Naming Plugins

Stevedore uses setuptools entry points to define and load plugins. An entry point is standard way to refer to a named object defined inside a Python module or package. The name can be a reference to any class, function, or instance, as long as it is created when the containing module is imported (i.e., it needs to be a module-level global).

## Names and Namespaces

Entry points are registered using a name in a namespace.

Entry point names are usually considered user-visible. For example, they frequently appear in configuration files where a driver is being enabled. Because they are public, names are typically as short as possible while remaining descriptive. For example, database driver plugin names might be “mysql”, “postgresql”, “sqlite”, etc.

Namespaces, on the other hand, are an implementation detail, and while they are known to developers they are not usually exposed to users. The namespace naming syntax looks a lot like Python’s package syntax (`a.b.c`) but namespaces do not correspond to Python packages. Using a Python package name for an entry point namespace is an easy way to ensure a unique name, but it’s not required at all. The main feature of entry points is that they can be discovered across packages. That means that a plugin can be developed and installed completely separately from the application that uses it, as long as they agree on the namespace and API.

Each namespace is owned by the code that consumes the plugins and is used to search for entry points. The entry point names are typically owned by the plugin, but they can also be defined by the consuming code for named hooks (see `HookManager`). The names of entry points must be unique within a given distribution, but are not necessarily unique in a namespace.

this page last updated: 2026-07-13 22:23:38

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