Local plugin not registering

[ali-ramadhan]

I'm trying to figure out how to use local plugins so following the documentation (https://mrmoe.readthedocs.io/en/latest/developers/writing_plugins.html#local-plugins).

I placed https://github.com/MoeMusic/moe_random/blob/main/moe_random/random.py under <configuration directory>/plugins/random.py and added enable_plugins = ["random"] to my configuration file but Moe doesn't seem to see it (or rather, I get no random command when I run moe --help).

(moe-py3.9) ➜  ~ exa -lT ~/.config/moe/
drwxr-xr-x    - alir  3 Nov 13:24 /home/alir/.config/moe
lrwxrwxrwx   40 alir  2 Nov 17:07 ├── config.toml -> /home/alir/music-tagging/moe_config.toml
.rw-r--r--  53k alir  3 Nov 13:24 ├── library.db
drwxr-xr-x    - alir  3 Nov 13:40 └── plugins
.rw-r--r-- 1.9k alir  2 Nov 19:36    └── random.py

My Python is pretty rusty so sorry if I'm doing something obviously wrong!

[ali-ramadhan]

I think I figured it out. I just had to add ~/.config/moe/plugins to the PYTHONPATH environment variable.

Then the issue was that random.py clashed with the random module from the standard library so I renamed it to random_item.py and it worked.

Should a note about including the plugins directory in PYTHONPATH be added to the documentation on local plugins?

[ali-ramadhan]

Hmmm never mind I think it works without PYTHONPATH, maybe the real issue was random.py silently conflicting with stdlib random.

[jtpavlock]

Nice catch, it does indeed seem that plugins with the same name as a module in the stdlib (or any other module in the namespace I would imagine) causes issues. I'll add a note in the docs to watch out for name conflicts. This should only effect local plugins though since published plugins should all be prefaced with moe_.

Edit: added note in the docs 2e08126