Hey, super specific configuration question - our IT have packed Speckle in a way that seems to split the functionality across two regions:
Rather than the Kits being at the %appdata% location. The thing is, this seems to work without incident via the desktop connector, and this seems to work fine in the Grasshopper plugin, after initially throwing a few weird “no kits” exceptions that seemed to disappear pretty quickly, and now I can’t replicate.
I’m going to try to get the installers working on a new machine tomorrow so there’s a few less variables to consider, but can somebody from the Speckle team walk me through the folder locations where the connectors check for Kits? If Objects is in %programdata%, can users still add their own kits to %appdata% and both locations will be checked? Is this unsupported behaviour that just happens to work by windows magic???
In short, user-specific data like the accounts, config and data dbs should always live under the user roaming folder.
The kits can usually be located in different locations:
under the same %appdata%/Speckle/ folder mentioned above, also the default used by Manager for single-user installs
under ProgramData/Speckle for system-wide installations. This is the behavior when running the installers manually and selecting “install for anyone using this PC”. NOTE for this location to be picked correctly, the addin/connector also needs to be installed under ProgramData, and this is not possible for all connectors.
You can also specify a SPECKLE_USERDATA_PATH environment variable to override the default location of both kits and user data.
It’s important not to mix & match manual and Manager installations, so if your IT is installing connectors manually, users should NOT also have manager installed.
So, to answer your last question: kits should NOT exist under both programdata and appdata, and the location where the connector is installed should also match the kits one (either system-wide or user-specific). That might have been the cause for some of those “kits not found errors”.
Happy to hear more about your IT requirements so we can make our configuration more flexible and less painful to set up
Hey just to 100% confirm @teocomi, when you say ‘users should NOT also have manager installed’ does that mean the manager can be skipped entirely? We’d just need to have some process for adding user credentials to the userdata path, or even our own installer path and override the environment variable?
A more user-friendly way is to just ask users to log in from the Revit/Rhino connector UI, is that possible, or were you looking to automate that via the IT deployment as well?
No, no, that makes sense - for some reason I thought that the plugins required the manager for their auth, but this is clicking into place now - thanks for your patience!
Not at all , Manager was required in the past, but now any connector with DesktopUI also allows to log in one or multiple accounts. We should clarify this in our docs!
Just bear in mind that it’s not available in Grasshopper or Dynamo, for which the users will need to log in from the Rhino/Revit connectors instead.
That’s a perfectly reasonable limitation - I just wiped the Speckle manager and installed and it worked fine (fine-ish, it did send me to a failed http://localhost:29363/ refused to connect page in the browser) But I think that might solve a decent chunk of our issues.
So to confirm, if we skip the manager and just use individual installers, and ensure that %SPECKLE_USERDATA_PATH% is configured and %SPECKLE_USERDATA_PATH%/kits is where IT is installing our kits, things should work as intended?
Honestly it might be more sustainable long term if every plugin shipped with their own local build of .\Kits\Objects as default, and then checked appdata/kits for any supplementary kits.
The reason why we are centralizing kits is to ensure all your connectors are using the same version, which we wouldn’t be able to guarantee if we shipped the kits with each addin.
Yes that’s correct!
If you find any reproducible issues we’d love to hear and try address them!
