Adding New Applications

Meco™ uses simple JSON structure in order to provide comprehensive solutions when it comes to launching applications. Each application, which from this point on we'll be referring them as apps, would have a dedicated JSON file called app file. All app files are contained and served by mMecoSettings package, therefore we'll be using this package to operate on apps. This approach gives you many capabilities on top of just launching apps, which you can use in your production pipeline.

Initialize a Development Environment

For this tutorial we need two packages to be in our main development environment on the master project. These packages are; mNukeExample, mMecoSettings. If you've installed Meco™ yourself, you would have these packages in the main development environment since they would have been created automatically.

Create and/or initialize the master project with main development environment with these two packages present.

You should see all two packages initialized from your main development environment in the displayed information, like so;

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DEVELOPMENT
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# ...

mMecoSettings                 > /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mMecoSettings
PATH                          : /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mMecoSettings/bin/darwin
PYTHONPATH                    : /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mMecoSettings/python

mNukeExample                  > /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mNukeExample
DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH    : /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mNukeExample/lib/darwin
PATH                          : /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mNukeExample/bin/darwin
PYTHONPATH                    : /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mNukeExample/python

# ...

Creating a New App File

Type the following command to create a new app file with given name, which is nuke12.03WithFont.

mmecosettings-create-app nuke12.03WithFont

You should see a similar success message like the one below.

Meco App file has been created.

/<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mMecoSettings/resources/apps/nuke12.03WithFont.json

Open the created file and replace the content of it with the following snippet. Please feel free to replace executable paths with the existing ones on your platform.

Please Note: I assume that you have provided existing and valid executable path(s) for the platform you are currently working on.

{
    "developer": "your@emailaddress.com",
    "description": "Nuke 12.0v3 with fonts",
    "darwinExecutable": "open -a Nuke12.0v3.app",
    "linuxExecutable": "nuke",
    "windowsExecutable": "nuke.exe",
    "globalEnvClassName": "Nuke",
    "application": "nuke",
    "folderName": "nuke",
    "version": "12",
    "packages": []
}

The following keys are the only accepted keys of an app file.

developer

Data Type: str

Email address of the developer who created the app file.

description

Data Type: str

Description about the app.

darwinExecutable

Data Type: str

Executable, or command that launches the app on Mac OS.

linuxExecutable

Data Type: str

Executable, or command that launches the app on Linux OS.

windowsExecutable

Data Type: str

Executable, or command that launches the app on Windows OS.

globalEnvClassName

Data Type: str

Global environment class name, which must be implemented in mMecoSettings.packageGlobalEnvLib Python module as we'll do.

application

Data Type: str

String representation of the application, lower case and usually one word.

folderName

Data Type: str

Name of the folder, which would be found under the packages.

version

Data Type: str

Version of the application

packages

Data Type: str

This key is not used in this release, please ignore it for now.

Now you can activate Meco™ on another terminal or PowerShell window and type the following command.

Please Note: App flag and its values are auto-completed as well.

# meco-init

meco -de main -a nuke12.03WithFont

Upon executing the command you can see that the environment initialized for Nuke, and Nuke itself is launched as well. The displayed information should look like the following.


# ...

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DEVELOPMENT
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
mNukeExample                  > /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mNukeExample
PYTHONPATH                    : /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mNukeExample/python

# ...

Adding App Based Custom Environments Globally

We have mNukeExample/nuke/12/font folder as you may have noticed, though it didn't get initialized with the environment we've initialized above.

Imagine every Nuke related package may have this path, and we like to initialize it every time we initialize an environment for Nuke. In such case we can do that globally meaning that we only have to create a global settings for it and Meco™ handles rest of the work for us.

Open the following Python module in your editor.

/<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mMecoSettings/python/mMecoSettings/packageGlobalEnvLib.py

This Python module contains settings, which would be applied to all packages globally. Add the following classes and save the file.

## @brief [ ENUM CLASS ] - Nuke folder structure in a package for Linux.
class NukeLinux(object):

    ## [ str ] - Nuke font path.
    NUKE_FONT_PATH      = ['FOLDER_NAME/VERSION/font']

#
## @brief [ ENUM CLASS ] - Nuke folder structure in a package for Darwin.
class NukeDarwin(NukeLinux):
    pass

#
## @brief [ ENUM CLASS ] - Nuke folder structure in a package for Windows.
class NukeWindows(object):

    ## [ str ] - Nuke font path.
    NUKE_FONT_PATH      = ['FOLDER_NAME\\VERSION\\font']

Values of folderName and version keys of the app file will replace FOLDER_NAME and VERSION keywords in the paths provided under the classes above. These paths will be initialized as NUKE_FONT_PATH if they are exist for each package in the environment.

Some very important points to pay attention to regarding the implementation we provided as snippet above:

  • Combination of two names would determine the name of the classes in the mMecoSettings.packageGlobalEnvLib module.

    • First part must be the class name as it appears in the app file (this is the nuke12.03WithFont.json file we've created previously) with globalEnvClassName key.
    • Second part is the name of the platform that starts with capital letter, either Linux, Darwin or Windows.
    • These names must be concatenated without any special characters.

  • Since Darwin (Mac OS) is Unix based OS, we can simply inherit Linux version of the setting class directly.

  • Please also note that, in Windows OS version of the settings class backward slashes are used instead of forward slashes.

Meco™ will use globalEnvClassName value, which is Nuke in this particular case with considering the platform name in order to get the class you added in mMecoSettings.packageGlobalEnvLib Python module. Once the class is obtained by Meco™, its static members are used to get the environment variable names and their corresponding relative paths. These paths are tested against all packages, and they get initialized for given environment variable if they exist.

Now it's time to test the changes. Activate Meco™ on another terminal or PowerShell window and type and execute the following command.

# meco-init

meco -de main -a nuke12.03WithFont

You can verify that, NUKE_FONT_PATH is indeed initialized for mNukeExample package by looking at the displayed information, which would look like this.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DEVELOPMENT
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

# ...

mNukeCore                     > /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mNukeCore
NUKE_FONT_PATH                : /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mNukeCore/nuke/12/font
NUKE_PATH                     : /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mNukeCore/python
PYTHONPATH                    : /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mNukeCore/python

# ...

Ignoring Application Launch

Sometimes you may want to initialize an environment as if you were launching an application while you are not. In such cases you can use -iae flag in order to ignore (not invoke) the application executable itself. Let's type and execute the following command on a new terminal or PowerShell window.

meco -de main -a nuke12.03WithFont -iae

As you can see in the displayed information, NUKE_FONT_PATH environment variable is initialized as if we launched the application. However, you can also see in ENV section that, the application executable is ignored. So we initialized the environment for Nuke, but we just did not launch the application itself.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DEVELOPMENT
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

# ...

mNukeCore                     > /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mNukeCore
NUKE_FONT_PATH                : /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mNukeCore/nuke/12/font
NUKE_PATH                     : /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mNukeCore/python
PYTHONPATH                    : /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mNukeCore/python

# ...

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ENV
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
App File              : /<PATH>/meco/master/developers/<USER_NAME>/development/main/mMecoSettings/resources/apps/nuke12.03WithFont.json
Description           : Nuke 12.0v3 with fonts (App executable is ignored)
Global Env Class Name : Nuke
Application           : nuke
Folder Name           : nuke
Version               : 12

# ...

However, if you want to launch the application directly by using its executable from this point forward you can also do it since the environment itself is initialized for the application. All the relevant environment variables will be used by the application in such case as well.