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Maya plugin

Maya plugins are quite modular, and my favorite way of packaging Maya tools.

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:
- A plugin can only be a single .py file, because the plugin folder is not in the Python path.
It can’t be a Python package, or a zip file.
If you want to include additional files, I recommend to distribute them as a Python module in the scripts folder, and import them from the plugin. You can also set them as a dependency, see Maya plugin template.
- There is no native support for dependencies on:
- other Maya plugins. (However using plugget this is possible)
- Python packages (a custom solution can be seen in Maya plugin template)
You can depend on another package, e.g. import numpy, but installing the plugin won’t auto install the numpy dependency.

Instead, you can use a Maya module to vendor multiple Maya plugins or python packages.
However, I recommend to not use more than 1 Maya module per project, and package your tools in plugins instead.

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

Low prio

  • how to control startup load order of plugins

Maya - how to enable-disable plugins