Loading a plug-in from outside the plug-ins folder

Development Pipeline & Plugins
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Hello everyone,

I am looking for a way to add a plug-in from a network share or local disk outside the project/build structure. Why? We are creating dynamic content as pure content plug-ins and need to be able to load the plug-in into an already running runtime application. As the data is quite large, copying it to the plug-ins folder is not expedient.

I was hoping to use IPluginManager::MountExplicitlyLoadedPlugin_FromFileName | Unreal Engine 5.4 Documentation | Epic Developer Community (epicgames.com) but stepping trough the code I’m under the impression that it does not allow for content “outside” the actual project or build.

Any advice would be highly appreciated.

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I was partially successful using IPluginManager::MountNewlyCreatedPlugin | Unreal Engine 5.4 Documentation | Epic Developer Community (epicgames.com). I could copy the plug-in after the project was loaded, it wasn’t recognized by the Editor and when I used the call above it mounted the plug-in and I was able to access the contents.

To make this work dynamically and outside the project folder I would furthermore need to either make this work with a directory hard link or add a new search path for plug-ins if that is possible. The hard link works but not dynamically meaning it has to be in place before the Editor starts. Creating it while running does not work.