Les Fées Spéciales update add-on for Blender

This Blender add-on fetches, installs and updates scripts and dependencies.

Installing

Download this add-on in zip format, and install it from Blender’s User Preferences.

Usage

Go to the add-on’s user preferences, search for its name (LFS Package Manager), and after activating it, unfold its preferences by clicking the arrow to the left of the name.

A list of packages appears, with a button to install or update the package, as well as a button to install them all at once.

Configuration

Destination

You can choose where the add-ons will be installed. By default, they go into Blender’s scripts directory, but this can be overridden by either the user preferences .., or a custom path.

Add-on sources

Add-ons can be installed from various sources, accessible from the Sources tab. Each source can be either a local path, or a web URL.

A source is a json file containing information about add-ons to install. See Package options, below.

If a package is found in multiple sources, only the first one will be used, so the order of sources matters.

Sources are stored and loaded from the config.json file, so that default list of sources may be given to artists when setting up a project.

Package options

The packages json file, pointed to by the latter option, contains these fields:

[
    {
        "name": "Camera plane",
        "platform": ["Linux", "Windows", "Darwin"],
        "service": "gitlab",
        "group": "lfs.coop/blender",
        "project": "camera-plane",
        "ref_type": "branch",
        "ref": "main",
        "activation": "camera-plane",
        "categories": ["Layout"],
        "files": {"scripts/addons": ["*.py"]}
    },
    {
    ...
    }
]

• name: A name for this add-on. Should generally be the same as the actual add-on, but is only used in the GUI.
• platform: Optional list of platform names, for add-ons available only on specific OSs. The names are those returned by Python’s platform.system().
• service: The website hosting the add-on. Currently supported services are gitlab and github.
• group: The URL subpath to the project. On GitHub, this would be a user or organisation. On GitLab, additional group and subgroup may be used.
• project: The name of the project on the forge.
• ref_type: Type of git ref to use for download. May be branch or commit.
• ref: The git ref to download.
• If ref_type is branch, the add-on will query the latest commit in this branch from the forges’s API, and get that commit.
• If ref_type is commit, it will be directly downloaded.
• activation: The add-on name, either <addon>.py or <addon>/ directory. This is used to show an activation checkbox next to the add-on’s name in the list.
• categories: A way to group add-ons by category in the UI. If the list is empty, the add-on will go into a nameless category.
• files: An optional dictionary of destinations in the Blender script directory, and for each, a list of files to copy there. Paths should be full zip paths, so a glob may be used to specify them more easily. If not provided, the package manager will try to automatically install relevant files.
• pip_deps: A list of Python dependencies to download using pip.

License

Blender scripts published by Les Fées Spéciales are, except where otherwise noted, licensed under the GPLv2 license.