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Maya plugin

Maya plugins are quite modular

Pros

  • Plugins manage their own startup code, allowing you to avoid using userSetup.py, which always runs on startup.
  • Plugins can be enabled or disabled per user, letting you toggle the startup code more easily compared to Maya modules.

Cons

Maya plugins don’t support:
- plugins can only be 1 .py file, because the plugin folder is not in the Python path
- no modules or zip files
- dependencies on:
- other Maya plugins
- Python package
You can depend on another package, e.g. import numpy, but installing the plugin won’t auto install the numpy dependency.

You could instead use a Maya module to vendor multiple Maya plugins or python packages.

Notes

  • Since plugins are not importable, they live in their own namespace, and can have the same name as a importable Python module
  • Maya plugin path is not added to sys.path
  • invalid plugins without a init plugin method still show up in the plugin manager
  • You could release 1 plugin, and 1 folder to the plugin path. And then edit sys.path to import the folder. But you might as well put that folder in scripts instead.
    📁 plugins 
    🗒️ my_plugin.py
    📁 my_plugin_lib 
        🗒️ module1.py
        🗒️ module2.py

ideally a plugin is self contained

  • it adds itself to the menu
  • since a plugin is a single file, it aims to avoids dependencies that don’t ship with Maya for easy manual install.
    but if we write more complex python code this is not reasonable, e.g. pymel, numpy, …

Extend ideas

  • how to handle plugin dependencies?
  • best way so far is to avoid dependencies
    • TODO sample
  • and use run_after_load / deferred load approach
    • TODO sample

Low prio

  • how to control startup load order of plugins

How to enable/disable a plugin

Maya Python