setup bqt develop environment

You only need to setup the bqt develop environment, if you plan to edit bqt code. If you just want to install bqt, check out

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Setup

After cloning the bqt repo, the bqt addon won't yet show up in Blender.
To use bqt, copy the bqt module to Blender's modules path, or copy the add-on code to Blender's addons path.
To avoid needing to do this every time you make a code update, you can:

• symlink
• editable package install
• VS-Code Blender extension

Sym link

• You can create a symlink from your repo to blender's add-on or modules path. Then any update in the repo auto reflect in Blender on restart of Blender.

mklink /J "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.93\scripts\addons\bqt" "C:\Users\hanne\OneDrive\Documents\repos\_Blender\bqt\bqt"

Pros

• can be used to install bqt as an addon or a module
• saves time copy pasting folders over every time you want to test a change

Cons

• If you symlink the addon and uninstall the addon in Blender, your repo folder might be deleted resulting in loss of uncommitted work.
• Symlink is hard to keep track of when starting to use it in multiple places. I accidentally deleted some work a few times even though "I know what I'm doing"

Editable package install

Pros

• saves time copy pasting folders over every time you want to test a change
• Cleaner than symlink, doesn't accidentally deletes your work.
• Only works for Python packages. So you can only install bqt as a module, not an add-on. Bqt comes pre-packaged already, with it's setup.py file.

Cons

• this only works for packages python modules
• Blender doesn't like editable installs by default, you need to append sitedir to the sys.path on startup. This can be done automatically on startup with a script in blender's startup path ./scripts/startup/*.py

VS-Code Blender extension

#TODO 👷 investigate, might be able to cleanly install bqt as addon, and trigger real time refresh of script code in Blender. But you have to start Blender through VS code