User Guide

Get Started

The common use-case for Pike is to enable dynamic loading of Python packages from various locations on a user’s filesystem. This is usually to facilitate the usage of plugins.

The easiest way to use Pike to load Python packages is to use it as a context manager:

from pike.manager import PikeManager

with PikeManager(['/path/containing/python/packages']) as mgr:
    classes = mgr.get_classes()

If you need to use Pike for an extended period of time (such as for testing), you can use a normal instance of Pike. However, the downside to that is that you’ll need to manually trigger Pike to cleanup itself when you’re done.

from pike.manager import PikeManager

manager = PikeManager(['/path/containing/python/packages'])
classes = manager.get_classes()
manager.cleanup()

Discovery

Pike also includes a set of discovery functions to allow for someone to find modules or classes that have been imported or that are available on a filesystem.

Installation

Install from PyPI

pip install --upgrade pike

Install from source

You can find the source for Pike located on GitHub. Once downloaded you can install Pike using pip.

If you want to just do a normal source install of Pike the execute:

# In the Pike source directory
pip install .

If you want to make changes to Pike, then install execute:

# In the Pike source directory
pip install -e .