A Basic Blender Dev Environment
03/24/2025
I've poked around Blender's add-on system and it turns out, it's.. just Python. Nothing wild. But the feedback loop between programming and testing is quite large. I've put together a small example repository that allows for quick iteration, where every change is automatically synced into Blender.
The development process for a Blender add-on is a bit dicey - Blender doesn't have a built-in add-on dev command or anything really that would make it easy to iterate on an add-on. For all I know, the expected development process is to run the code directly inside Blender using the Scripts tab, and then putting that back together inside your actual add-on project, to be built, tested, and then eventually shipped.
I prefer to develop as close as possible to the thing I end up shipping, so I wanted to have a way to automatically sync my external add-on with Blender and test out the full add-on pipeline continuously.
I've created a little example that uses a dev.sh to automatically rebuild and reload an add-on inside Blender. Now, whenever I make changes to anything inside the add-on, it gets rebuilt, and then Blender gets restarted with the new add-on version installed and ready to be tested: