Development Setup

Development Setup

Here's a suggested development setup.

Project Directory

Working directly in the SketchUp Plugins directory makes version control of your source code a challenge. It's much easier to keep the source separate and make SketchUp load your extension from this custom location.

Lets say you have a project with a file structure like this:

~/Source/ExampleExtension/.git/
~/Source/ExampleExtension/.gitignore
~/Source/ExampleExtension/src/hello.rb
~/Source/ExampleExtension/src/hello/main.rb
~/Source/ExampleExtension/tests/

To load your extension from this directory you can create a file in your Plugins folder that add additional directories to $LOAD_PATH.

Note that this should only be done in your development environment and not on your users' machine.

Create a file in your Plugins folder: <...>/Plugins/!external.rb

Within the file you can specify what additional directories to load:

SOURCE = File.join(ENV["HOME"], "Source").freeze

paths = [
  "#{SOURCE}/ExampleExtension/src",
  # Add more as needed here...
]

# Un-comment if you want to see any potential loading errors in the Ruby
# Console:
# SKETCHUP_CONSOLE.show

paths.each { |path|
  $LOAD_PATH << path
  Dir.glob("#{path}/*.{rb,rbs,rbe}") { |file|
    Sketchup.require(file)
  }
}

Reloading Extension without Restarting SketchUp

If you don't make changes to menus, toolbar or class inheritance you can in most cases reload extensions without having to restart SketchUp between every change.

One way to make it easier to reload the whole extension is adding a small utility method that you can call from the Ruby Console:

# ~/Source/ExampleExtension/src/hello/debug.rb
module Example::HelloWorld

  # Reload extension by running this method from the Ruby Console:
  #   Example::HelloWorld.reload
  def self.reload
    original_verbose = $VERBOSE
    $VERBOSE = nil
    pattern = File.join(__dir__, '**/*.rb')
    Dir.glob(pattern).each { |file|
      # Cannot use `Sketchup.load` because its an alias for `Sketchup.require`.
      load file
    }.size
  ensure
    $VERBOSE = original_verbose
  end

end # module