External Provider Packages

External adapter packages can register WorldForge providers without modifying the WorldForge repository. WorldForge discovers them at construction time through the worldforge.providers Python entry-point group.

Entry-point declaration

Add an entry to your package's pyproject.toml:

[project.entry-points."worldforge.providers"]
my-policy = "my_pkg.adapters:make_my_policy_provider"

The entry-point name (my-policy) is the provider name WorldForge will surface in providers(), doctor(), and benchmark/evaluation reports. The value (my_pkg.adapters:make_my_policy_provider) is a fully qualified callable that returns a :class:~worldforge.providers.base.BaseProvider.

Factory contract

The referenced callable takes one optional keyword argument and returns a BaseProvider:

from worldforge.providers import BaseProvider, ProviderProfileSpec
from worldforge import ProviderCapabilities


def make_my_policy_provider(*, event_handler=None) -> BaseProvider:
    return MyPolicyProvider(event_handler=event_handler)

Three rules:

1. The provider's name attribute must equal the entry-point name. WorldForge raises WorldForgeError from ProviderCatalogEntry.create() when they disagree, which prevents accidental name collisions in user-facing output.
2. The factory must return a BaseProvider subclass. Returning anything else is rejected with a typed error when the entry is invoked.
3. The provider follows the same env-gated auto-registration rules as in-repo providers: configured() must return True for the provider to be auto-registered. Hosts can still register an unconfigured provider explicitly via forge.register_provider(...).

Failure behaviour

Discovery never crashes the host. Each entry-point that cannot be wrapped is recorded with a typed reason:

Cause	Example reason
Module import fails (missing optional dependency)	missing dependency: No module named 'torch'
Loaded value is not callable	entry point did not resolve to a callable
Name collides with an in-repo provider	duplicate name (in-repo provider already registered)
Two entry points share a name	duplicate name (already discovered earlier in this group)
Loader raises any other exception	load failed: <message>
Factory raises at construction time	factory raised: <message>

The full report lives on WorldForge.entry_point_discovery():

from worldforge import WorldForge

forge = WorldForge()
report = forge.entry_point_discovery()
print(report.discovered_count, "external providers discovered")
for skip in report.skipped:
    print(f"skipped {skip.name}: {skip.reason}")

Disabling discovery

Two switches turn discovery off:

1. Constructor flag: WorldForge(discover_entry_points=False) skips discovery entirely.
2. Environment variable: setting WORLDFORGE_DISABLE_ENTRY_POINTS to a non-empty value has the same effect for all forges in the process. Hosted environments use this to keep CI runs deterministic when third-party packages are installed for unrelated reasons.

When discovery is disabled, forge.entry_point_discovery().enabled is False and no external providers are registered.

Stability

This surface is provisional. The entry-point group name and discovery report shape are stable for the current release, but EntryPointSkip.reason strings are human-readable diagnostics rather than a machine-parseable contract. Treat them like log messages.

Related public API

Symbol	Purpose
worldforge.ENTRY_POINT_GROUP	The entry-point group name (worldforge.providers).
worldforge.ENTRY_POINT_DISABLE_ENV_VAR	Name of the disable env var.
worldforge.discover_entry_point_providers	Run discovery without instantiating a forge.
worldforge.EntryPointDiscoveryReport	Frozen dataclass with the run summary.
worldforge.EntryPointSkip	One skip record (name, value, reason).
WorldForge.entry_point_discovery()	The report captured at construction time.

Validation

uv run pytest tests/test_provider_entry_points.py tests/test_provider_catalog.py
uv run mkdocs build --strict