Thuban is designed to be extensible. The term Extension is used as a general term for anything that extends Thuban. This chapter introduces into some oppportunities how to add and handle extra functionality developed by your own or third parties.
After Thuban has been started for the first time, a directory .thuban is created within your home directory. There you can add a file thubanstart.py which will be imported by Thuban at start-up. It is recommended to add only import-statements to this file to keep the actual code of extensions separate.
The modules to import must either be found through the environment variable PYTHONPATH or directly be placed into the .thuban-directory.
As an example, copy the file examples/simple_extensions/hello_world.py of the Thuban source code into the .thuban-directory of your home directory. Now add add the statement import hello_world to the file thubanstart.py and run Thuban. You will notice an additional menu where the new item for the Hello-World extension is placed - select it to see the Hello-World message.