Automated release of RV Plugins

Hey, guys,

Does anyone have ideas for automating the release of RV Plugins? For example, I have a bunch of users that have RV installed on their machines and I’m looking for the simplest way to release plugins to them. Preferably, without them having to do anything.

The users launch RV with the Shotgun Desktop using a Software path set in Shotgun.

Any advice?

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Hey Josh – @Michael.Kessler and I put our heads together, and we have some preliminary ideas as to how to go about this with your distributed Toolkit config.

It seems that there are two pieces to achieving this: getting the plugin files onto the users’ machines, and running rvpkg to install them.

For the first piece, you have the option, when using a distributed config for Toolkit, to include a bundle_cache folder in the config .zip file that contains any custom apps or other Toolkit code you want to push out with your config. See the third note in this section of documentation. So, you could stuff your files into that folder, and push them out to your users that way.

But as far as running rvpkg, I’m not sure of the best place to add that to the workflow. The tk-multi-launchapp has a before_app_launch hook, which would run every time you launch RV from Desktop, right before the actual launch of RV. But it would be overkill to run rvpkg every time, and it would slow down your launches considerably.

So… a couple thoughts on that:

  • You could do a check in before_app_launch (compare file timestamps? or versions?) to see if you need to run rvpkg and only do so if necessary
  • I’m not sure if there is a hook that runs at the time that a new config is downloaded. If so, that’d be the “correct” place to run it. I’ve posed that question with the TK engineering team – I’ll let you know what I find.

Hope that helps! Let us know if you have any other questions!

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Some great ideas in there. Thanks!

I’ll write-back if we’re able to find something that works smoothly.

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