Programmatically edit and load entrypoints

[mikegrima]

Hello! I am working on a project that needs to load plugins dynamically. I am making use of entrypoints and am trying to figure out what the best way is for making test plugins and having those test plugins be loaded only during my unit tests.

Some more context:

I have a function that will dynamically load entrypoints like so:

from importlib.metadata import entry_points
from types import ModuleType
from typing import Dict

def find_plugins(entry_point_group: str) -> Dict[str, ModuleType]:
    plugins = {}

    for ep in entry_points(group=entry_point_group):
        plugins[ep.name] = ep.load()

    return plugins

In my unit tests, I want to test that this is able to load my test plugins. I want to be able to do this dynamically via a pytest fixture where I can programmatically make an entrypoint to refer to my testing plugin, pass in the fake group name to my function above, and then have that entrypoint be cleaned up when the test is completed. Upon reviewing the documentation and looking at the code, I couldn't find any easy way to do this.

The closest I saw was this StackOverflow entry, which uses the old pkg_resources module: https://stackoverflow.com/a/48666503

At the moment, the way that I was able to move forward was to add this entry to my pyproject.toml file, and passing in unit_test_plugins to my function above:

[project.entry-points."unit_test_plugins"]
basic_test_plugin = "my_project.tests.testing_plugins.basic_plugin:BasicPlugin"

I would prefer to not have the entry above in my pyproject.toml and make it purely automatic with a fixture. Is there a way to do that?

Thank You