Speckle Manager for Linux?

Features & Ideas
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Using the API libraries I’ve been increasingly using the helper wrappers that delegate account handling to the host as maintained by the manager.

As Blender and FME are both installable on Linux hosts I wondered if I need to fork that principle in order to support those instances.

This is less a connector installation need (in my selfish interest)

Any plans?

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Yes, definitely, @gjedlicska actually started looking into it some time ago!
It’s not super high priority in our backlog but we’re happy to bump it up if ppl need it :wink:

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Hey @jonathon

this is def on my list, even if there are other more important issues to tackle first.
But it would be nice to get some convo going on this topic.

The account management part would be pretty straight forward, but there’s already an ok stopgap measure in the form of manually adding accounts (which im sure you know of).

The second part would be installing connectors which is where the situation gets a bit tricky.
Depending on distro, package manager, packaging format, the permutation of installation configs feels overwhelming.

With @izzylys we’ve successfully wired up the Blender connector on Ubuntu using both the .deb and the flatpak version of the app, we havent tried with snaps. Based on that just for 1 distro 1 connector this would mean 3 separate installation methods for 1 connector. Not to mention navigating around the different sandboxing technology pitfalls.

Which part of the manager would you like to have the most?
It would also be useful to know what setup ppl prefer?

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Personally I don’t need it but wanted to know if the account management could be relied upon as existing by any specklepy based distributions.

Low priority is fine for that part as you have it in sight and documented workarounds. (Though appdata is platform specific)

I’m lazily building on your shoulders. :muscle:

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I would be interested in this to see if my implementation of speckle nodes in sverchok can run on Linux.

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Hey @wassimj,

i think there is no technical blocker to do this even without manager. The above mentioned manual account solution works for the blender connector or for plain python scripts using specklepy.

As for installing the blender connector on linux + blender as flatpak here’s how i’ve got it working:

  • find the version number of python that is used by the current blender install, for Blender 3.0 its Python 3.9.7
  • create a new virtual env with a matchin python version, and install the requirements of bpy_speckle into that env
  • get the user specific folder for the type of installation that was used, for Flatpak its in: ~/.var/app/org.blender.Blender
  • to install the speckle addon copy ( or symlink ):
    • the bpy-speckle folder to the addons folder, so that this exists: ${blender_user_config_dir}/config/blender/${blender_version}/scripts/addons/bpy_speckle
    • the site-packages directory of the bpy_speckle dependecies under the name modules so that the ${blender_user_config_dir}/config/blender/${blender_version}/scripts/addons/modules directory exists, and its content is the dependencies of bpy_speckle
  • symlink the ~/.local/Speckle folder into ${blender_user_config_dir}/data/ so that the ${blender_user_config_dir}/data/Speckle folder exists. This way the machine wide accounts and objects cache is used even in a sandbox installed blender

the steps might wary depending on ur distro / installation mechanism, but the general direction of the steps are the same.

If you need help with setting it up, let me know, at some point we might like to officially support this too.

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