I’m adding stuff to my Sta.sh plugin for Lightroom, just because I can. (And while I wait for the Sta.sh API to stabilize.)
Things like
- Auto-updating to the latest version
- Debug logging & submission of logs
- Usage tracking
- New Sta.sh API features (Like folder renaming, except it’s broken as of when I write this post.)
So for the auto-update stuff, I was looking for some documentation of just how to get a check-box to show up in the plugin manager, so I can give the user the option of auto-updates. Haven’t found it yet – what little I’ve found says I should have a file named “PluginManager.lua”, which there seems to be no documentation of on Adobe’s site (or anywhere else, annoyingly.), and the only reference I’ve found is code.google.com/p/gallerysync/source/browse/trunk/GallerySync.lrdevplugin/InfoProvider.lua?r=2 . Oh hey, most of it’s in the SDK Guide, not in the sample code
But what I did find was www.assembla.com/spaces/lrdevplugin/wiki – which seems to be a collection of notes on Lightroom plugin creation, as well as an interesting development setups. (And a plugin framework, just for good measure – but if I want to use it is another question altogether.)
The dev environment in question is this one: www.assembla.com/spaces/lrdevplugin/wiki/%28Mac-Win%29_IntelliJ_and_LUA
I couldn’t be bothered to download and compile the Lua source, so I just used the LuaforWindows binary from here: (Not using the newly released 5.2.0, because I’m not sure Lightroom would accept it.)
And because I use GitHub, not SVN, the build.xml file that was provided had to be modified. to use Git. I found an answer in a relevant StackOverflow question to use instead of the SVN revision code as specified. (Grab my revisions from github here.)
However, Ant needs the Java SDK to run – which I didn’t have, so off to download that too.
Once downloaded and installed, Ant still failed with “JDK not found”. I had to add the JDK to the project, then select it in the Ant Build panel, and only then did it run successfully.