Managing plugins

External Plugins
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I am now using a number of 3rd party Kicad plugins - Interactive HTML Box, @maui RF Footprints, KiAutotext, WireIt, Replicate layout, Archive project & Swap Pins/Units from @MitjaN.Additionally, there are a variety of footprint generating scripts.

Most of these are available from Github. In order to try and organise these and keep them updatable I have cloned them to an easily accessible path and then made soft links to them, putting the links into the relevant locations.

Has anyone come up with a better way of organising these - especially across a couple of different computers? I am using macOS, but I guess the principle applies whatever OS you use. The issues that I am struggling with are that many of the plugin repos are named similarly or even identically (‘kicad-action-script’ or similar), some of them need to be in the plugin root directory with additional resources. Some of these repos have both footprint generators (which live in /Applications/KiCad/kicad.app/Contents/SharedSupport/scripting and get wiped out on an update) and also have components that live in ~/Library/Preferences/kicad/scripting/ (I am thinking @maui RF tools). I now have a dozen or more soft links to keep track of.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining, but I would be interested if anyone has an easier way to manage and update them? Personally, Think it would be great if KiCad could have a plugin manager - something like the Arduino one springs to mind.

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There have been a couple of attempts in this direction. The two I can remember are by @eelik: One script to rule them all and @bobc: Announcing KiCad Package Installer - kipi.

But I haven’t looked into any of them.

1 Like
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I will have a look at these - Kipi looks very promising.

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Yeah, that’s pretty much how I handle it. I use the GitHub Desktop app to keep the plugins updated. I took this mess a messy step further and only update the plugins on my main computer. I have the repositories cloned into my DropBox folder, and the other computers just have soft links to the DropBox. This way I know that all my computers are using the same version of the plugins. I rarely, if ever, leave KiCad running on any one computer so I haven’t had the opportunity to run into cache collisions yet… (I could probably update the DropBox local repositories from any of the machines, but I’m afraid of collisions.)

The primary reason why I started using the soft link method is usually in the repositories (particularly the repositories that have multiple plugins) only a subfolder needs to be visible to KiCad.

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There is also a request for a plugin manager in https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1823733.
I think something like in Eclipse or Notepad++ could be very useful.

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