Plugin Manager 2 - 📦 Add

For updating or installing new plugins (extra channels or features), there's a user plugin manager. It's available as feature extension itself.

  1. See the F12 config dialog 🔌 Feature section.

  2. Enable the ⨯ Plugin Manager (listed near the end).

  3. Restart streamtuner2 one last time for this change to take effect.

Once activated it brings up a new 📦 Add tab in the configuration window.

Install dialog for user plugins

You can scan for available/new plugins there. And have them downloaded right away. New plugins are just downloaded, not implictly enabled. Reopen the config dialog to see them in the regular 📻 Channels or 🔌 Feature tabs, and then enable them.

Updated plugin versions won't be instantiated right away if they've been active already. That requires either a restart. Or disabling + saving once, then reenabling them.

Channel and feature plugins and settings
→ Contrib/Extra Channels — Downloadable channel plugins
→ Feature plugins — Additional feature plugins

Configuration

  • Alternative download repositories may be configured. (Little practical value at the moment.)

  • And you can let the plugin manager handle autoactivation of changed plugin states.

    • After reconfiguring existing channel plugins, they get automatically instantiated or disabled in the user interface. (Which avoids the usual restart).

    • This currently doesn't work with feature/core plugins. Plugin deactivation is mostly visual, but does not undo menu extensions or undefine callback hooks.

User plugins

Downloaded plugins are stored in ~/.config/streamtuner2/plugins. To remove them, delete the individual *.py files there manually. But keep the __init__.py stub.

Core plugins (those which are installed system-wide) can often also be updated. The user-saved plugin will take precedence after a restart. However the version number in PluginManager2 still shows the system-installed/older version regardless.

So you'll have to take care to eventually refresh/delete outdated user plugins, whenever you install a newer Streamtuner2 version.

Disable user plugin loading

Since this is still rather experimental, you may disable all associated features by starting ST2 via:

streamtuner2 -d pluginmanager2

Which inhibits loading this whole extension. (The -d flag also works for any other plugin name.)