Provisioning KiCad install

Software
1

Hello people,

I’m finding myself relying on more and more plugins during my pcb design workflow, and I was wondering if anyone has tried provisioning a KiCad install with all their plugins installed already? My first thought was that this might be possible through docker, but haven’t been able to find any documentation on it so far.

2

The major problem is that the python API is unstable between major releases. Bugfix releases already keep the plugins as they are. But when you update to the next major version, at least some of the plugins will stop working. You would be forced to fix things manually anyway.

The other consideration is that a new better API is in plans and under work, at the moment planned and promised for v9 (although I’m a bit sceptical about that). The old API will be removed later. All plugins must eventually be rewritten. But then the new API will be stable and the new plugins will probably survive between major updates.

For these reasons I don’t think it’s reasonable to try to work on that right now.

1 Like
4

Maybe you can write some shell or python scripts to unpack the needed versions of the plugin packages in the plugins directory?

5

Reading again, maybe I misunderstood the purpose. I assumed you meant keeping the plugins from the old install. That’s different than automating installation of the new versions of the old plugins to a new KiCad installation.

6

I don’t see much benefit for combining KiCad + plugins in some docker container. On first sight it does sound logical, but both the plugins (as Eelik already mentioned) and KiCad itself (bug fix updates every month) change too much to be very useful (Unless you have to install KiCad on a whole lot of computers, such as for classrooms).

You can create a list of currently installed plugins with grep:

paul@cezanne:~/.config/kicad/8.0$ grep -i "identifier" installed_packages.json 
                "identifier": "com.github.MitjaNemec.Archive3DModels",
                "identifier": "com.github.MitjaNemec.ReplicateLayout",
                "identifier": "com.github.adamws.kicad-git",
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