Can Plugins live outside of a project in Perforce source control?

Development Pipeline & Plugins Plugins
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1

I’m setting up UE5 on a perforce streams server right now, and I plan to have multiple projects alongside the Engine folder. I also plan to develop multiple plugins that I would like to be shared between all projects, so I want to know if it’s possible to host them in a sibling folder and map them into projects from that directory somehow. The folder structure would look like this:

* Engine
* Plugins
    * PluginA
    * PluginB
    * PluginC
* ProjectX
* ProjectY
* ProjectZ

Where ProjectX, ProjectY and ProjectZ all have access to and build PluginA, PluginB and PluginC.

The two options I can see for doing this are:

  1. Map plugins from external directories into the project using configs, similar to how .uprojectdirs files work (I don’t know if this functionality exists, but I can’t find it)
  2. Use virtual streams in Perforce to map the plugin directory to the right place in the project’s internal hierarchy

I know how to do option 2 already, but it has the drawback of only being able to have a single active project, and requiring users to switch virtual streams before they use another project.

Does anyone know if option 1 exists? Any thoughts and help much appreciated!

2

It turns out that yes, you very much can do this. You can add new ones through the editor and place them in an external folder - this generates a property in the uproject that looks like this:

"AdditionalPluginDirectories": [
		"../Plugins"		
	]

This can be copy-pasted into other uproject files that you want to share the plugins between. It seems it’s not 100% supported but it works, so I’m happy :slight_smile:

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