Reinout van Rees: Simple qgis plugin repo

At my company, we sometimes build QGIS plugins. You can install those by hand by unzipping a zipfile in the correct directory, but there's a nicer way.

You can add custom plugin "registries" to QGIS and QGIS will then treat your plugins just like regular ones. Here's an example registry: https://plugins.lizard.net/ . Simple, right? Just a directory on our webserver. The URL you have to configure inside QGIS as registry is that of the plugins.xml file: https://plugins.lizard.net/plugins.xml .

The plugins.xml has a specific format:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<plugins>

  <pyqgis_plugin name="GGMN lizard integration" version="1.6">
       <description>Download GGMN data from lizard, interpolate and add new points</description>
       <homepage>https://github.com/nens/ggmn-qgis</homepage>
       <qgis_minimum_version>2.8</qgis_minimum_version>
       <file_name>LizardDownloader.1.6.zip</file_name>
       <author_name>Reinout van Rees, Nelen &amp; Schuurmans</author_name>
       <download_url>https://plugins.lizard.net/LizardDownloader.1.6.zip</download_url>
   </pyqgis_plugin>

   .... more plugins ...

 </plugins>

As you see, the format is reasonably simple. There's one directory on the webserver that I "scp" the zipfiles with the plugins to. I then run this script on the directory. That script extracts the (mandatory) metadata.txt from all zipfiles and creates a plugins.xml file out of it.

A gotcha regarding the zipfiles: they should contain the version number, but, in contrast to python packages, the version should be prefixed by a dot instead of a dash. So no myplugin-1.0.zip but myplugin.1.0.zip. It took me a while before I figured that one out!

About the metadata.txt: QGIS has a "plugin builder" plugin that generates a basic plugin structure for you. This structure includes a metadata.txt, so that's easy.

(In case you want to use zest.releaser to release your plugin, you can extend zest.releaser to understand the metadata.txt format by adding https://github.com/nens/qgispluginreleaser . It also generates a correctly-named zipfile.)