blenderaddons-ng

Background

blenderaddons-ng focuses on modern, automated testing of Blender add-ons, with an emphasis on creating and running unit tests for core add-on functionality, rather than just interactive testing. The repository provides a clean, reproducible development environment for building, testing, profiling, and benchmarking Blender add-ons.

This project is the next generation of the blenderaddons repo, designed for better structure, automation, and developer experience.

Project Goals

• Provide a Visual Studio Code project and repository structure for developing multiple Blender add-ons.
• Enable easy development in DevContainers, allowing for flexible Blender and Python versions.
• Support automated testing using pytest and pytest-cov, integrated with GitHub Actions.
• Facilitate profiling and benchmarking of add-ons using line_profiler and pytest-benchmark.
• Gradually migrate and modernize add-ons from the blenderaddons repository.

Folder Structure

• /add-ons — all add-on code lives here; each add-on package has its own subfolder if it includes an __init__.py.
• /tests — contains pytest-discoverable tests, prefixed with test_.
• /packages — (planned) to store zipped add-on packages.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/varkenvarken/blenderaddons-ng.git
cd ./blenderaddons-ng

Open the folder in VS Code. If prompted, rebuild the DevContainer, or select "Rebuild Container" from the command palette to begin developing.

Requirements

• Ubuntu 24.04 base image (via Dockerfile) with all Blender dependencies
• Python version matched to Blender (built from source)
• bpy module from PyPI (headless Blender)
• fake-bpy-module for VS Code type checking
• pytest-cov for test coverage
• pytest-benchmark for benchmarking
• line_profiler for profiling

See requirements.txt and the Dockerfile for details.

Development Workflow

1. Copy add_ons/example_simple.py to add_ons/<new_name>.py as a starting point.
2. Modify the code, update the bl_info dictionary and OPERATOR_NAME variable.
3. Copy tests/test_example_simple.py to tests/test_<new_name>.py and write thorough tests.

Profiling

Use line_profiler to profile operators. Example:

LINE_PROFILE=1 python3 add_ons/example_simple.py

Expensive code should be factored out from execute() for profiling.

Benchmarking

Use pytest-benchmark to measure performance. Example:

pytest-benchmark compare 0001 0002

Example benchmarks are in tests/test_example_simple.py. Results are stored in .benchmarks (gitignored).

Contributing

Pull requests for improvements or new add-ons are welcome! Please ensure that your contributions:

• Are your own work and licensed GPL v3 or later
• Are compatible with the current Blender version
• Include comprehensive tests

See the GitHub repository for more details and to get involved.

License

This project is open source and available under the GPL v3 or later.