How to set up and populate an update site

This tutorial explains how to set up a website to distribute your plugins. It assumes that:

• Your plugins are correctly installed in Fiji
• You have either:

1. Initialized your personal update site; or
2. WebDAV write access to a website that serves static web pages.
3. SSH/FTP access to a website that serves static web pages.

• In case you want to use your own server, it must have an empty, public web accessible folder where you intend to publish your updates. The Fiji updater will not create that empty folder.

Start the updater and check your plugins

First, start the updater:

Click on the 'Advanced mode' button and set the view options to 'View non-Fiji plugins only' to see your plugins. In this case, the plugin we'll be uploading is contained in A_Jolly_Useful_Plugin.jar.

Set up the update site

Click the 'Manage update sites' button to bring up a dialog to allow entering your site information. Click the 'For Uploading' checkbox to specify that you'll be uploading your plugins to the site.

Click the 'Add' button and fill in your choice of name for the site and the public URL. The values for the SSH hostname and the upload directory depend on what type of update site you have:

• Note that for SFTP and SSH, the URL and the upload directory need to point to the same location on the server. In this case, the webserver maps genomics.lbl.gov/~gavin/FijiPlugins to ~gavin/public_html/FijiPlugins on the tatooine server.

• Note: you need to prefix the SSH host with <username>@, e.g. gavinrocks@tattooine.pdq-bach.org.

Click 'OK' to add the update site.

If the update site has not been initialized yet (i.e. if nobody else has initialized that site yet), you will see a dialog like this:

Click 'Yes'. You will then need to enter your login credentials for the site. This will upload an initial plugin database containing no records at all. Without this step, you will not be able to upload plugins.

Once the site is set up, the 'Manage update sites' dialog should look something like this:

If you made a mistake, you can edit the site information by pressing - you guessed it - the Edit button.

Upload your plugins

Close the dialog, and in the Status/Action column, set the your plugin's status to 'Upload it'. Select the name of your upload site in the resulting popup dialog.

Note that this plugin's dependencies, ij.jar and someJarOrOther.jar, are automatically determined by the updater. Hence if you require 3rd party packages for your plugin you can place them into the jars folder of Fiji and the updater will automatically upload them to the site.

Enter any information you wish to provide about the plugin:

Finally, click 'Upload to server' to copy your plugin to the server and allow others to access your plugin. If you have dependencies that are not part of Fiji (such as someJarOrOther.jar), Fiji will ask you if you want to upload the jar as well. Finally, you will be asked for your login credentials again and the files will be uploaded to the server.

Check that your plugins are now registered as Fiji plugins by selecting 'View files of the '[your site name here]' site':

That's it - you're done. Now, anyone who wants a copy of your plugins merely needs to add your update site to the Update manger via the URL you specified, and your plugins will be downloaded and updated in their Fiji installations just like the standard Fiji plugins.

Publishing your update site

If you want to let other people know about your update site, just add it to the list of update sites.

See Also

How to follow a 3rd party update site