Pragtical Plugin Manager (ppm)

ppm manages Pragtical plugins, colors, fonts, and editor installations. It includes the Plugin Manager UI for searching, filtering, and managing addons.

Both are bundled with official Pragtical releases. Open Plugin Manager: Show from the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) to use the UI.

The UI plugin requires Pragtical 3.10.0 or later.

Release builds use the manifest from this repository's latest branch by default. See the changelog for release history.

Installation

Download binaries for your platform from the latest release or the continuous build.

Windows

Run in PowerShell:

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://github.com/pragtical/plugin-manager/releases/download/latest/ppm.x86_64-windows.exe" -OutFile "ppm.exe"
.\ppm.exe install plugin_manager --assume-yes

Alternatively, install the standalone binary with Scoop:

scoop install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pragtical/plugin-manager/refs/heads/master/pragtical-plugin-manager.json

Linux And macOS

For Linux x86_64:

curl -fL https://github.com/pragtical/plugin-manager/releases/download/latest/ppm.x86_64-linux -o ppm
chmod +x ppm
./ppm install plugin_manager --assume-yes

For macOS, replace the asset name with ppm.x86_64-darwin or ppm.aarch64-darwin. Use ppm.aarch64-linux for Linux ARM64.

Restart Pragtical after installing the UI plugin.

Usage

ppm list
ppm install editorconfig
ppm uninstall editorconfig
ppm update
ppm upgrade
ppm --help

Use pragtical pm in place of ppm to invoke the editor's bundled binary. For automated installation, pass --assume-yes and --userdir=<directory>.

Building

Requires a C compiler, Python 3, Meson, Ninja, and Git. Meson uses system libraries when available and downloads missing dependencies through wraps.

git clone https://github.com/pragtical/plugin-manager.git
cd plugin-manager
meson setup build --buildtype=release -Dstatic=true
meson compile -C build
./build/ppm --help

On Windows, the executable is build/ppm.exe. The static option embeds the Lua program so ppm can run without the source tree; it does not make the executable fully statically linked.

Dependencies are Lua, mbedTLS 4/TF-PSA-Crypto, libgit2, zlib, liblzma, and libzip. The microtar sources are vendored in lib/microtar/. No Git submodule checkout or CMake build is needed.

Static Dependencies

Build dependencies from the supplied wraps, as CI does:

meson setup build-fallback --buildtype=release --wrap-mode=forcefallback \
  -Dstatic=true
meson compile -C build-fallback

Linux release builds also use -Dfully_static=true and a musl compiler to avoid requiring a dynamic loader on the target system.

Cross-Compilation

For Windows from Linux, install MinGW-w64 and run:

meson setup build-windows --buildtype=release --wrap-mode=forcefallback \
  --cross-file=cross/x86_64-w64-mingw32.ini -Dstatic=true
meson compile -C build-windows

The output is build-windows/ppm.exe. Additional files in cross/ cover Linux aarch64/riscv64 musl and Android targets. Put the matching toolchain on PATH before configuring.

Platforms

Platform	Architectures
Windows	x86_64
Linux	x86_64, aarch64, riscv64 (experimental)
macOS	x86_64, aarch64
Android 8.0+	x86_64, x86, aarch64, armv7a

Tests

The suites use Pragtical's core.test framework. Build ppm, then run them with a Pragtical build that includes the current Plugin Manager:

pragtical test tests

With the sibling Pragtical checkout, use its isolated local runner:

cd ../pragtical
SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER=dummy SDL_AUDIO_DRIVER=dummy \
  ./scripts/run-local build test ../plugin-manager/tests

Integration fixtures use temporary local repositories and isolated ppm cache/config directories. Set PPM_BINARY to an absolute path to test another binary; otherwise the suite uses build/ppm or the packaged binary. Remote-stub fixtures require Git, and the multi-architecture symlink test is skipped on Windows.

Manifest

See SPEC.md for the manifest format. addons.files.extra.chmod_executable lists files to mark as executable after download or extraction.

Bug Reports

Include your operating system, ppm --version output, and the commands needed to reproduce the issue, preferably with a fresh --userdir.