LB+HB in the Package Manager

ladybug-tools
1

Is there any plans to add Ladybug/Honeybee/Dragonfly to the Rhino Package Manager? It seems like this could be a really powerful, easy way to manage installation and updating of the plug-in.

The biggest reason I could see for having problems would be in relation to having the appropriate version of Radiance, OpenStudio, and UrbanOpt required for the Honeybee and Dragonfly. I would like to propose a (possibly overly optimistic and naïve) solution to this issue.

Since you can launch command line through grasshopper, one could conceivably create a utility component which would run a command line script to install these programs. The script would look at the current version of LB, download the appropriate versions of each program, then install them to the appropriate location. Possibly users could even provide installation path overrides which could update the program location for LB/HB as well. There could even be toggle for each program to uninstall and reinstall each component specifically (ei: if you only want to update Radiance, but not UrbanOpt or Open Studio).

To ensure people know to run the component, LB/HB components could be set to give a warning directing users to use the utility component when there is a version mis-match or program missing.

Maybe this is something that can be added to 1.4 or maybe it would take a version even further in the future. Hopefully this can start a discussion on the topic of use Package Manager.

2

Hi @cbehn ,

We are already making use of some of the Rhino Package Manager features in our single-click installers but we confirmed with McNeel that using the Rhino Package Manager to distribute simulation engines like OpenStudio isn’t really feasible right now given that OpenStudio is almost 2 GB in size. We actually have a component that kinda works similar to the Rhino Package Manager (the LB Versioner) that can sync all of the non-engine dependencies of the LBT Plugin to a particular version. But, even with this, downloading a whole installation of OpenStudio is just not feasible and results in dropped connections for people without strong internet.

So, for the time being, the only real solutions are to either:

  1. Buy a single-click installer from us (by emailing info@ladybug.tools).
  2. Do you own management of simulations engines using the free Food4Rhino installer and the free installers for the various engines.
3

We already have checks like this. Every component that uses a given simulation engine will check the installed version of the engine before it runs and give an error if it’s not compatible. We also have a HB Check Versions component that will tell you the versions of your installed engines.