Reporter Backends#

Reporter backends is a plugin hook that allows you to customize the display of certain elements at the command line. Below is a list of all the elements that can currently be customized:

Progress bar (displayed during package downloads)
Spinner (displayed while conda is waiting for a long running task to finish)
Confirmation input (yes/no dialogs)
conda info layout

This can be configured using the console setting either as a command line option or by defining it in the .condarc file.

For more information on configuring and using reporter backends in conda itself see:

Settings: console

Example plugin#

The following example defines a simple plugin which uses the pformat() function for rendering parts of conda's output:

Hint

This is just a partial example. To see a fully functioning example of a reporter backend, checkout the console module.

from pprint import pformat

from conda import plugins
from conda.plugins.types import (
    CondaReporterBackend,
    ReporterRendererBase,
    ProgressBarBase,
)


class PprintReporterRenderer(ReporterRendererBase):
    """
    Implementation of the ReporterRendererBase abstract base class
    """

    def detail_view(self, data):
        return pformat(data)

    def envs_list(self, data):
        formatted_data = pformat(data)
        return f"Environments: {formatted_data}"

    def progress_bar(self, description, io_context_manager) -> ProgressBarBase:
        """Returns our custom progress bar implementation"""
        return PprintProgressBar(description, io_context_manager)


class PprintProgressBar(ProgressBarBase):
    """
    Blank implementation of ProgressBarBase which does nothing.
    """

    def update_to(self, fraction) -> None:
        pass

    def refresh(self) -> None:
        pass

    def close(self) -> None:
        pass


@plugins.hookimpl
def conda_reporter_backends():
    yield CondaReporterBackend(
        name="pprint",
        description="Reporter backend based on the pprint module",
        renderer=PprintReporterRenderer,
    )

Below is a summary of everything we've defined:

Defining `ReporterRendererBase`#

The first class we define, PprintReporterRenderer, is a subclass of ReporterRendererBase. The base class is an abstract base class which requires us to define our own implementations of its abstract methods. These abstract methods are used by conda when rendering output and are where all the customization we want to do occurs.

Defining `ProgressBarBase`#

The second class we define is PprintProgressBar. For this example, it is just an empty implementation of the ProgressBarBase. Defining this effectively hides the progress bar when this reporter backend is configured. We do this in this tutorial because a full implementation would take too long to explain. Please check out TQDMProgressBar for a more realistic example using the tqdm library.

Registering the plugin hook#

Finally, we define the conda_reporter_backends function with the plugins.hookimpl decorator to register our plugin which returns the PprintReporterRenderer class wrapped in a CondaReporterBackend object. By registering it with name set to pprint, we will be able to reference this plugin as a new backend for the console setting.

Using the reporter backend#

To use our newly registered reporter backend, it can either be specified in our .condarc configuration file:

console: pprint

Or, it can be specified at the command line using the --console option:

conda info --envs --console=pprint

Reporter Backends#

Example plugin#

Defining ReporterRendererBase#

Defining ProgressBarBase#

Registering the plugin hook#

Using the reporter backend#

Further reading#

Defining `ReporterRendererBase`#

Defining `ProgressBarBase`#