For the past two weeks, our OctoPrint group has been struggling with the plugin tutorial that I have mentioned in my earlier posts. Yesterday, Denzell (my partner) and I met up to try and solve our issues once and for all. The trouble with the plugin tutorial is that we have not been stuck getting the same error, rather we have encountered many errors that we have worked through, and then ran in to others. This makes us feel like we are making progress, however, it also feels like we are moving backward.

The main error that began our struggle was that after cookiecutter was installed and we began trying to run the plugin’s setup.py file, it would print a message something along the lines of “Cannot access OctoPrint’s setup tools. Are you sure you are under the same environment that OctoPrint is installed under?” This was frustrating because we were following the tutorial exactly.

When looking back on our download and setup for linux, we realized that we had installed OctoPrint inside of a virtual machine. We learned how to enter our virtual machine (the command source ~/OctoPrint/venv/bin/activate does the trick) and we picked up on the tutorial where you install cookiecutter. This time, everything seemed to work as we were able to run the setup.py file and it created the egg like it was supposed to. The trouble is now, the plugin still will not show up when we start the server. It cannot be found.

Denzell, and I were puzzling over the tutorial when we noticed that there were different versions of the plugin tutorial based on which branch you were using (master, devel, etc.). We knew that we should be using the devel branch, and checked it out using git. However, we were using the plugin tutorial for master. Our plans for today are to re-pull the devel branch of OctoPrint and follow the devel plugin tutorial. If this fails, we are going to reach out to Gina and the OctoPrint community with our troubles.