maya-plugins

maya-plugins (Bootstrap stage)

Manage and diagnose Maya plug-ins. The emphasis is on actionable failures: when something is unusable, the error says which of the four causes it is and what to do about it.

Verified Maya behaviours

Three things drive this design and are invisible under a mock (verified on Maya 2025):

• pluginInfo metadata flags - path, version, vendor, apiVersion, unloadOk, name - are only valid while the plug-in is loaded. Querying them for an unloaded plug-in raises. They are read opportunistically and reported as unavailable with a reason, never as a failure of the whole call.
• pluginInfo has no dependency flag at all (dependents, dependencies, requires are all rejected). Dependencies are inferred from the search path instead of pretending to be queryable.
• cmds.loadPlugin(..., quiet=True) still raises when the plug-in cannot be found - quiet does not suppress load errors. A failed load is therefore always an error, and Maya's message is surfaced verbatim.

There is also no cmds.pluginPath or cmds.getenv; the search path comes from the MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH environment variable, read through os.environ with a MEL getenv fallback for hosted interpreters.

Flow

1. list_plugins — what exists, and what is loaded.
2. diagnose_plugin — why a specific one is unusable.
3. load_plugin — load it, optionally setting autoload.
4. unload_plugin — unload it; refuses when Maya reports unloadOk=False unless force=True.
5. get_plugin_path — inspect the search path, or resolve a name to a file.

Notes

• Loading a plug-in does not register it permanently; autoload=True sets the preference so it loads in future sessions.
• Maya drops a plug-in from pluginInfo(listPlugins=True) once unloaded, so a second unload reports "already unloaded" rather than "unknown" when the file is still on the search path.

Scope

Managing plug-ins only. Running Python or MEL is maya-scripting.